Intra-vehicle wireless harness with mesh-networking

Recently there has been tremendous growth for intra-vehicle electronics technology with the advent of intelligent transport systems (ITS) society. Along with it, the weight of vehicle tends to increase with the increment of ECU and distribution cable. It causes to degrade the fuel efficiency and makes the repair and test difficult. It is therefore required to decrease the cable weigh and to ease the maintenance/repair. To solve these problems, wireless data transmission, so called wireless harness, has been suggested instead of the wire cable. However, there is significant propagation degradation within vehicle because of its hollow metallic body. In this paper, measurements using UWB-IR have been conducted for various antenna locations and the results are discussed.