News | 05/04/2020 Liebherr and Bertrandt start together into the mobile future

The Mobile Communication Gateway (MCG), the robust communication solution by Liebherr Components, will support the innovation platform HARRI of the engineering partner Bertrandt. HARRI is a technology carrier for the megatrends like digitization, connectivity, autonomous driving and electro-mobility. It incorporates technologies for high user experience, user-friendly interfaces, Car2X communication and efficient data processing. The basis for the digitalization of HARRI is the local pre-processing of the vehicle and environmental – the so-called edge computing. The freely configurable, powerful and robust telematics hardware enables edge computing, as well as data transfer to the cloud..

The Mobile Communication Gateway (MCG), the robust communication solution by Liebherr Components, will support the innovation platform HARRI of the engineering partner Bertrandt. HARRI is a technology carrier for the megatrends like digitization, connectivity, autonomous driving and electro-mobility. It incorporates technologies for high user experience, user-friendly interfaces, Car2X communication and efficient data processing. The basis for the digitalization of HARRI is the local pre-processing of the vehicle and environmental – the so-called edge computing. The freely configurable, powerful and robust telematics hardware enables edge computing, as well as data transfer to the cloud.

The MCG by Liebherr developed and manufactured on site in Lindau (Germany) takes care of the vehicle communication. It connects the data sources in the vehicle, reads the information via CAN and Ethernet interfaces and pre-processes them. In this way, it ensures the data optimization before transferring them to the cloud. The MCG is referred to as CDC (Connectivity Domain Controller) in HARRI’s vehicle architecture. Bertrandt used Docker containers to display the application layers on the CDC. Such a structure helped to ensure the security aspects and to implement software updates over-the-air (FOTA).

“We opted for the MCG, since the gateway is highly robust and offers extensive scope for development. There are not many suppliers who offer such a robust system”, says Wolfgang Darge, Project Manager at Bertrandt.

Based on the Linux operating system and the fully configured Yocto build system, the MCG is freely programmable, providing extensive scope for individual applications such as over-the-air software updates.

“As the gateway also fulfils the requirements of protection class IP5K2, it is ideal for the very demanding operating conditions of mobile machines – temperatures up to 70 °C, dust and vibration,” explains Martin Lorenzen, Project Manager at Liebherr-Elektronik GmbH in Lindau.

The telematics units receive the final touch at the in-house Liebherr Components Test Center, also in Lindau, where they are extensively tested.

Double the impact: MCG antenna diversity

The MCG sends and receives vehicle-relevant data via two antennas. As compared to a device with only one antenna, a gateway with two antennas has a significantly higher connectivity of around 93%.

Antenna diversity is particularly useful, when a vehicle is moving through areas with poor mobile network connections. Larger vehicles in particular benefit from it as two antennas help to overcome the problem of an interrupted connection through in-vehicle shadowing. So, HARRI benefits as well from higher connection quality and better availability.