Wireless controller area network for in-vehicle communication

One of the major challenges of today's in-vehicle electrical architecture is the rapidly increasing complexity of interconnecting controllers, sensors, actuators and other on-board electronic components. Traditionally, this task is accomplished using standard wired bus technologies such as Controller Area Network (CAN). In this paper we introduce the Vehicular wIreless CAN (ViCAN) - a CAN based hybrid communication architecture that is tailored to the in-vehicle environment and that aims at reducing wiring complexity by combining wireless and traditional wired CAN physical layers in a cost effective and seamless fashion. We show by analysis that such a hybrid architecture can potentially support highly reliable end-to-end communication with very low complexity and no/small degradation in data-rate.