Background
With the trend of intelligent networking in the automotive industry, connected vehicle technology is gradually being deeply applied in the products and services of electric two-wheelers, driving the intelligent transformation of the industry.
TAILG is a global leading brand in new energy travel tools. The company integrates the entire industry chain of research and development, production, sales, operation, and service, from two-wheelers to accessories. With an annual production capacity of over 12 million units, its products are sold in more than 90 countries and regions worldwide.
Leveraging its rich experience in the electric scooter sector, TAILG independently developed a connected vehicle platform and a user mobile app, providing high-end scooter users with a range of intelligent applications such as vehicle positioning, historical trajectory queries, electronic fence settings, remote vehicle search and control. This effort aims to create a convenient and innovative intelligent driving experience for users. Faced with challenges such as the massive connection volume, limited resources on the vehicle side, and complex network environments, TAILG chose the MQTT protocol and adopted EMQ's flagship product, EMQX Platform, as the access platform for vehicle networking, successfully building a stable and efficient vehicle-cloud interaction channel.
Challenges of the Connected Electric Two-Wheelers
To enable intelligent features for electric scooters such as vehicle control, status monitoring, positioning, and trajectory tracking, it is essential to incorporate various reliable sensor and control technologies. These include wheel rotation sensors, battery sensors, gyroscopes, and GPS positioning systems. Additionally, establishing a two-way data channel between the vehicle and the cloud platform is necessary to ensure efficient data collection from the vehicle end and prompt issuance of control instructions with minimal delays.
However, electric scooter connected with the cloud faces the following technical challenges:
- Vehicle-Cloud Communication with Low-Power Consumption: Electric scooters have limited computing and storage resources, which rely on battery power. To extend battery life and reduce energy consumption, TAILG needs a low-power vehicle-cloud communication solution that can be easily integrated into communication modules.
- Complex Network Environments: Electric scooters may face network signal issues and base station switches in complex environments when driving or parked. This demands stable network connections and real-time data transmission.
- Data Security Measures: Remote monitoring and start for electric scooters require secure collection, transmission and storage of sensitive vehicle and user data. Robust security measures are critical for user trust.
- Massive Connections and High Concurrency: TAILG aims to accommodate millions of users in the future. The platform must support concurrent connections and high throughput, with powerful data access, processing, forwarding, and integration capabilities. It also requires low-latency downstream command issuance through the vehicle-cloud channel.
- System Scalability: To meet the increasing demands for electric scooter connections and data processing, the system should have strong scalability to adapt to future business development scales.
Achieving Efficient Vehicle-Cloud Communication with EMQX Platform
TAILG chose the MQTT protocol for vehicle-cloud communication and selected EMQX as the message access platform to build a stable and efficient vehicle-cloud interaction channel.
Electric Scooter
On the vehicle side, various sensor modules such as wheel movement, battery, gyroscope, and GPS comprehensively collect vehicle data. The communication module integrates an MQTT client, enabling MQTT communication between the electric scooter and the cloud. Additionally, it is compatible with various mobile devices, including phones, watches, and bracelets, providing users with a rich interface and a convenient interactive experience.
Vehicle-Cloud Communication
The electric scooter network uses Wi-Fi, 4G/5G, and MQTT to establish reliable and low-power connections. MQTT is a lightweight message transfer protocol designed for low-bandwidth, high-latency, and unreliable network scenarios. It offers flexible and reliable communication with low-power consumption through a publish/subscribe model, session persistence mechanism, and QoS. This makes it superior to private TCP and HTTP protocols. Additionally, EMQX at the access layers ensures secure connection and data transmission through TLS authentication.
Cloud
Access Gateway Layer
The Access Gateway Layer ensures stable operation of the entire system. By leveraging the EMQX MQTT platform, the system can achieve high-concurrency connections and data throughput of MQTT messages.
- EMQX's distributed architecture supports millions of concurrent connections, ensuring high-concurrency access during peak periods, with low latency and high throughput. The highly scalable cluster architecture can expand with user growth, ensuring stable operation.
- EMQX's built-in rule engine enables the real-time bridging of massive data such as vehicle positions, status data, and user data transmitted from vehicles upstream to backend application services like Redis, relational databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and time-series databases. This rapid data acquisition facilitates business analysis.
- MQTT and EMQX ensure reliable and secure communication in complex network environments through features like keep alive, session persistence, and QoS levels. Even if the vehicles lose network connectivity or are powered off, message delivery resumes upon reconnection. This improves the immediacy of command control issuance.
- Hot configuration and upgrade mechanisms allow customers to adjust configurations without service interruption, maximizing continuity of vehicle connections and data transmission. Slow subscriptions and log tracking feature helps diagnose connection abnormalities or message delays.
Storage Layer
The storage layer is responsible for storing user data and vehicle information according to their specific characteristics and usage requirements. It employs multiple types of databases, such as relational and time-series databases, to provide a reliable data foundation for remote control and monitoring functionalities.
Service Layer
The system integrates multiple intelligent application services, including remote control, real-time positioning, and real-time monitoring of vehicle status. Additionally, the system can leverage historical data to learn from experience and make informed decisions regarding user riding speed and power output.
System Monitoring Layer
EMQX provides interfaces to push monitoring data such as cluster operational status, concurrent connections, message throughput, etc., to third-party monitoring systems like Prometheus and Grafana. This enables real-time visualized monitoring of overall system operation metrics, enhancing system operation efficiency and stability.
Achievements
Currently, TAILG has successfully launched its smart application services, which are compatible with a range of electric scooter models. The main benefits that EMQX brings to the entire system and business include:
- Improved system concurrency and stability: EMQX can support millions of concurrent users, ensuring that the system remains stable and reliable even during peak usage periods.
- Upgraded vehicle-cloud interaction: EMQX allows for real-time bidirectional transmission between vehicles and the cloud with millisecond-level latency, significantly reducing user wait times. Compared to traditional methods, EMQX improves the reliability, service quality, and user experience of smart electric two-wheelers.
This system enables users to monitor the real-time status of electric scooters via the mobile app, giving them a complete understanding of their scooter's operational status. Moreover, users can perform various functions like starting/stopping, locking/unlocking, and remotely adjusting the scooter's speed. Feedback surveys from users suggest that this application has significantly enhanced customer satisfaction for TAILG and has given them an edge over their competitors in the industry.