Real-Time Experiments Towards an Automotive OFDMA Communication Bus

Today's automotive communication systems use baseband pulse modulation and time-division multiple access. Future in-vehicle networks will need to serve a growing number of devices in a multipoint-to-multipoint topology. Therefore, we present a new automotive bus system which allows enhanced channel adaptation and fine-granular multi-user access based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). We highlight the advantages of OFDMA in automotive applications and sketch the concept. In this paper, we deliver a proof-of-concept for the OFDMA-based automotive communication bus by using an experimental real-time FPGA prototype.