IoT Network Management within the Electric Vehicle Battery Management System

The Battery Management System of an Electric Vehicle is a system designed to ensure safe operation of the battery pack, and report its state to other systems. It is a distributed system, and the communication between its sub-modules is performed through wired buses. In this article, we study the opportunity to use a wireless technology named IEEE Std 802.15.4 Time Slotted Channel Hopping, a standardized protocol for low power and lossy networks. We first describe the real-world experiments we did to measure the link quality, at Medium Access Control layer, for wireless nodes placed inside an EV battery pack. Then, we propose two topology management and scheduling strategies using techniques named Linear Programming and Simple Descent, based on the results obtained in the experiments. Their goal is to achieve efficient data transfer while complying to the battery management constraints.