New Solution Accelerates Development of Automotive Positioning Systems and Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

Crawley, UK – July 8, 2015 – Spirent Communications today launched its Automotive Record and Playback test system to help drive innovation and improvements in the rapidly evolving vehicle navigation and connected car ecosystem.

The test system enables automotive system developers to record many different real-world signals and then replay them repeatedly in development labs, to shorten the time taken to validate new hardware or software. This lab-based approach complements the conventional field testing using fleets of vehicles. It will also help to minimize the development and validation time for new features for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technology. V2V communications could mitigate many traffic collisions and reduce traffic congestion by sending and receiving basic safety information such as location, speed and direction of travel between vehicles approaching each other.  

“By providing vehicle manufacturers with a wide range of test capabilities from the wireless, positioning and computer networking industries that complement drive testing, we can help the auto industry adopt connected car technology with more confidence,” said Pete Nicholson, general manager of Spirent’s Automotive Business Unit. “Our system allows automotive OEMs to develop and validate new products more quickly, by making tests repeatable using real-world signals in a lab environment.”

This automotive test system is an integrated custom solution that provides radio frequency (RF) recordings for all the major Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)—GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, and QZSS— and vehicle CAN bus data. The system can also record up to four video streams, audio and other high-speed sensor data to provide a more complete record of the route. The recorded data is time-stamped and can then be replayed repeatedly to help engineering teams verify new designs work all over the world without leaving the lab.

To learn more about Spirent’s solution for in-vehicle navigation system development and testing, visit: http://www.spirent.com/Solutions/Automotive

Additional Resources

• Solution Overview:

  Deliver an Exceptional Experience—Test, enhance, and optimize connected vehicles

• White Paper:

  Reducing the time and cost of drive testing

• Blog Post:

  What's next for Automotive Positioning Systems?

Tags: Automotive network testing, vehicle to vehicle communications, connected cars, in-car navigation, Spirent, V2V