Delay Analysis and Time-Critical Protocol Design for In-Vehicle Power Line Communication Systems

With the emerging automated tasks in vehicle domain, the development of in-vehicle communications is increasingly important and subjected to new applications. The use of vehicular power lines has been a promising alternative to in-vehicle communications because of elimination of extra data cables. In this paper, we focus on the latest HomePlug Green PHY (HPGP) and explore its opportunity to support time-critical in-vehicle applications. Specifically, we apply network calculus to evaluate the worst access and queuing delay of various priority flows in vehicle bus networks. In order to maximize the bandwidth utility and satisfy the end-to-end hard delay requirements, we further propose a bandwidth efficient fair rate scheduling and delay sensitive traffic shaper. Performance evaluation supplemented by numerical and simulation results is also provided to show the advantage of HPGP and the proposed traffic shaper over the existing industry solutions.