• A traffic pole prototype leveraging the IOTA technology is now available marking a significant boost to the ALFRIED project.
• The use of IOTA will help build the traffic infrastructure at the highest level of resilience and security.

Project ALFRIED, one of Germany’s largest public-funded infrastructure projects has undergone a sizeable development. Sharang Parnekar, a software and hardware engineer at ETO Gruppe Technologies, overlooking the ALFRIED project, released the first traffic pole prototype for the project. Note that the ALFRIED infrastructure project leverages the IOTA protocol as its core technology.

The ETO Gruppe works on, among other future projects, the future of autonomous driving by developing traffic infrastructure sensor technology. However, one of the biggest challenges is the effective transmission of data to autonomous vehicles regarding the surrounding infrastructure.

The ETO sensor modules play a key role which provides all-around information such as speed, traffic information, and weather condition. The traffic poles will play a key role in transmitting this information accurately to the passing vehicles. The ALFRIED project will help achieve successful data transmission while “demonstrating the highest possible levels of autonomy and security in changing traffic and environmental conditions”.

The ETO Gruppe manager Mr. Parnekar further explained:

Today the pole is empty… but in future it will have a smart sensor system that will be intelligent enough to provide data safely and securely to other data consumers.. a video that explains it.

Although what Mr. Parnekar has demonstrated is just the beginning of the massive project, it still resembles the fruition of the idea.

IOTA to Secure the Infrastructure

To operate its traffic infrastructure at the highest level of resilience and security levels, ETO Gruppe shall be leveraging the open-source distributed technology IOTA. IOTA’s ” secure, feeless, lightweight and highly scalable decentralized infrastructure” prove to be an ideal match for all of ETO Gruppe’s requirements.

As a result, the ETO Gruppe shall be leveraging all IOTA libraries like Stronghold, Streams and Identity, in building the ALFRIED architecture while warranting for confidentiality, security, and traceability of data and services. Benjamin Bönisch, VP Corporate Development and Strategy at ETO GRUPPE said:

It is important to recognize the aspect of decentralized infrastructure redundancy as a native part of the IT architecture. Energy-wasting blockchains are contrary to our ecological philosophy. IOTA is already “green”. With its latest upgrade “Chrysalis”, the IOTA network became even more energy-efficient, which is key for battery-operated sensors.

IOTA can be directly integrated into the hardware and can provide for the highest confidence in data security directly at the source while at the same time does not have any transaction fees for pure data transactions nor value transactions. Furthermore, additional aspects like digital identities and self-sovereign identities can be integrated. We are very confident about IOTA technology.