In-Vehicle Networking: Protocols, Challenges, and Solutions

Fuel utilization efficiency and cost reduction are two major goals in designing in-vehicle networks. Aiming to address these two issues, we investigate in-vehicle networking protocols from both wired and wireless perspectives by first presenting representative solutions in each area, then identifying the challenges to current solutions, and finally advocating the use of the automotive Ethernet. Also, we propose a priority-based scheduler for the automotive Ethernet. Our preliminary experiments show that the proposed scheduler is effective and flexible, and thus is applicable to next-generation in-vehicle networks. We hope that further studies in this area can be inspired by our work and will be forthcoming in years to come.