RFID Technology for Intra-Car Communications: A New Paradigm

In this paper we investigate the potential application of RFID technology in future cars as a cheaper, more reliable, and secure wireless alternative to the current wired operation in the engine compartment and other parts of a car where several sensors are connected to adapters which, in turn, are connected to a serial data bus for carrying the measured sensor data to various embedded microprocessors. The preliminary measurement results show that the coherence bandwidths of various channels between a reader and several RFID tags placed into different locations in the car are sufficiently large for the purpose of in-car sensor network communications while the power losses of certain channels are quite excessive and a special distributed antenna system may be required to deal with the problem.