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UBC Theses and Dissertations

Medium access control protocol design for in-vehicle power line communication Kenarsari Anhari, Amir

Abstract

Nowadays, the number of electronic devices in vehicles grows at an exponential rate. For the purpose of communication between these components, several standardized communication protocols such as controller area network (CAN), local interconnect network (LIN), and FlexRay have been developed and are used in vehicles. However, the use of additional wires for data communication still results in a significant increase in the complexity, volume, weight, and cost of wiring harness. Vehicular power line communication (V-PLC) is an interesting alternative that offers numerous advantages. This technology reuses the existing direct current (DC) power network in vehicles as the physical medium for data transmission and allows eliminating some of the wiring harnesses devoted to convey data signals. Hence, This technology can potentially reduce the vehicle cost, weight, and fuel consumption. However, to provide reliable communication over power lines, several challenges need to be addressed. These include impulsive noise produced by electrical devices connected to the bus and frequency-selective behavior of the power line channels introduced by impedance mismatches in the wiring harness. In this thesis, we study research challenges for the medium access control (MAC) protocol design of V-PLC networks. We propose MAC protocols for such systems, which provide fast collision resolution, and perform performance evaluations on these protocols in terms of collision probability, system throughput, and packet delay. Our results show that these protocols outperform the previously proposed protocol, contention detection and resolution (CDR) in all scenarios. We then investigate the effect of carrier sensing errors on the performance of the proposed MAC protocols. We start with addressing the problem of detection of unknown signals in impulsive noise by using a robust detector, which first removes the impulses from the signal and then performs linear signal detection on the cleaned samples. We obtain the network throughput and delay of the proposed protocols as a function of carrier sensing errors. We then suggest a framework for the optimal joint design of the physical layer signal detector and MAC layer protocol.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International