In-vehicle hybrid electrical architecture

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 concept of hybrid electrical architecture as one that combines wireless and wired communication in a tight fashion. Namely, communication over the wired backbone is aware and in accordance with the communication on the wireless media and vice versa. The reasons for adopting hybrid architecture for intra-vehicle communication are increased robustness, reliability, lower latency, while preserving both wireless and wired resources. In this paper we propose a hybrid communication protocol tailored to a CAN based backbone. Our protocol increases end-to-end hybrid communication link´s reliability while preserving wired CAN bus load, minimizes latency, and achieves all that with very low complexity.