Communication Technologies and Network Protocols of Automotive Systems

Abstract

Automotive industry has gone through rapid changes in the past few years. The usage of electronics and electronic control units (ECUs) have increased manifold, and this has also affected the way different subsystems communicate. Communication technologies and protocols are required to fulfill demands of fault-tolerance, dependability, bandwidth and determinism of demanding and safety-critical applications. This paper presents a survey of state-of-the-art and the most commonly employed communication technologies and protocols; both wired and wireless for in-vehicle and vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication in the automotive systems. The technologies such as LIN (Local Interconnect Network), CAN (Controller Area Network), MOST (Media Oriented Systems Transport), and Flexray are compared in terms of the performance, reliability, cost and protocol characteristics. The study shows that Flexray is an excellent network topology for in-vehicle communication that has higher degree of fault tolerance, and is suitable for hard real time systems with high bandwidth. Moreover, wireless technologies i.e. Bluetooth, ZigBee, Wi-Fi and UWB are discussed that satisfy different requirements of diagnostics and multimedia communication for in-vehicle and vehicle to vehicle communication and can be used for advanced autonomous driving systems. The paper also presented issues that need to be addressed to fully realize the potential of these communication technologies and other advancements in automotive industry.