  Although connectivity services have been introduced already today in many of
the most recent car models, the potential of vehicles serving as highly mobile
sensor platform in the Internet of Things (IoT) has not been sufficiently
exploited yet. The European AutoMat project has therefore defined an open
Common Vehicle Information Model (CVIM) in combination with a cross-industry,
cloud-based big data marketplace. Thereby, vehicle sensor data can be leveraged
for the design of entirely new services even beyond traffic-related
applications (such as localized weather forecasts). This paper focuses on the
prediction of the achievable data rate making use of an analytical model based
on empirical measurements. For an in-depth analysis, the CVIM has been
integrated in a vehicle traffic simulator to produce CVIM-complaint data
streams as a result of the individual behavior of each vehicle (speed, brake
activity, steering activity, etc.). In a next step, a simulation of vehicle
traffic in a realistically modeled, large-area street network has been used in
combination with a cellular Long Term Evolution (LTE) network to determine the
cumulated amount of data produced within each network cell. As a result, a new
car-to-cloud communication traffic model has been derived, which quantifies the
data rate of aggregated car-to-cloud data producible by vehicles depending on
the current traffic situations (free flow and traffic jam). The results provide
a reference for network planning and resource scheduling for car-to-cloud type
services in the context of smart cities.
