An experimental study of reliable wireless communications in vehicles

Abstract

Recent works on enhancing comfortability and convenience in vehicles reveal that information collections by various wireless sensor nodes have the potential due to their easiness of install and their small size. However, the conventional wireless network standards achieve insufficient reliability for practical in-vehicle communications. In this paper, through implementing 2.4GHz devices in an actual vehicle with crews in the cabin. Based on the results, we propose a method to provide reliable multi-hop communications in a vehicle using overhearing. In the proposed method, the neighbor nodes overhear a packet sent from a source node. If the destination node does not receive the packet, neighbor nodes send the overheard packet as proxies of the source node. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method by computer simulation and experimental implementation. One of the results shows that the proposed method achieves 99.9% packet arrival ratio within 20ms.