Priority-based energy-efficient MAC protocols for the in-car power line communication

An increasing number of electronic control units in today's vehicles leads to rising communication demands. So far, growing demands were countered with adding additional communication buses at the cost of vastly increasing complexity. One possibility to reduce complexity and costs for the future in-car communication infrastructure is the usage of Power Line Communication (PLC). PLC reduces the cabling to the minimum - the power lines. In this paper, after summarizing main requirements for future in-car communication systems, a recently proposed medium access protocol based on the HomePlug and IEEE 1901 standard is discussed. The protocol is based on unique message priorities and shows good performance regarding throughput and flexibility. In order to decrease the energy consumption, in this paper further new protocol variants are evaluated and compared with the pure priority-based medium access protocol. For the comparison, effects on throughput, delay and loss in flexibility are taken into account. As a result, a combination of rotating prefix and additional pending frame indication slot is found most promising.