FAQ

1. What is OTA?

OTA - Over The Air is a service that enables base data / content updates for a limited spatial area that is defined by HomeArea, or several larger spatial areas that are pre-defined as SubRegionArea. These updates are required to ensure the content is current and up to date.

2. How does OTA service define sub region areas and user's home area?

The whole map is devided into a few sections by map data analysts, which are referred to as sub region areas. Each of them is assigned a unique identifier for user to designate.

The user's home area is determined by the following:

  • The user's home address
  • The user's work address
  • The user's most recent trips
3. What content is included in OTA updates?

The OTA updates include the following included in the HomeArea/SubRegionArea:

  • POI (Points of Interest)
  • Addresses (Streets, House/Door numbers and Admin)
  • Map data
  • 3D Landmarks & Junction views
4. How big are OTA updates?

OTA updates of home area range from 10MB to 100MB based on the size of the user’s home area and how much data changed but typically are less than 50MB. OTA updates of sub region area usually take several hundreds of MB, depending on the relevant sub region area's scope.

5. Are there any prerequisites for OTA service to fully function?

The OTA service depends on the Data Collector service since it listens to the SET_HOME / SET_WORK events published by the Data Collector service. Hence, we recommend initialization of the Data Collector service before the OTA service. Additionally, the client must implement the SET_HOME / SET_WORK events in the Data collector service.

6. How do OTA updates happen?

To obtain an OTA update the client needs to enable SSL communication with the server and implement two-way authentication following which the download data is encrypted on the server and transmitted to the client where it needs to be decrypted.

6. When should the OTA updates be triggered?

The client application can have its own strategy to trigger OTA updates. The client needs to balance the needs of data freshness with the potential bandwidth usage cost in determining the update frequency.