As the number of powerful electronic control units (ECU) and associated distributed sensor and actuator components inside the car keep increasing every year, the manufacturing and installation of wiring harnesses for transmission of data and power for all these components require considerable engineering effort. Eliminating, or greatly reducing, the wires in the harness can potentially provide part cost savings, assembly and maintenance savings, and fuel efficiency due to decreased weight. Moreover, wireless sensing would enable new sensor technologies to be integrated into vehicles (e.g. Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems, Intelligent Tire), which would otherwise be impossible using wired means. The objective of this project is to design the physical (PHY) layer and medium access control (MAC) layer of the communication protocol for intra-vehicular wireless sensor networks.
Cross-Layer Epidemic Protocol Design for Inter-Vehicular Communication Networks
Inter-vehicle communication (IVC) networks are expected to significantly improve the safety of our transportation systems by making information available beyond the driver’s knowledge. Driver behavior, constraints on mobility and high speeds create unique characteristics such as rapid but somewhat predictable topology changes and frequent fragmentation. The objective of this project is to develop a cross-layer design for IVC networks taking into account the parameters of all layers from physical to transport layer and using epidemic algorithms to deal with dynamic topology changes. In contrast to prior studies that either provide analytical results for cross-layer interactions without any communication protocol design or perform cross-layer design considering only a limited subset of cross-layer parameters, our key contribution will be integrating functionalities of all layers from physical to transport into a cross-layer protocol. As an integral part of the project, we aim to create realistic models for the topology of IVC networks based on realistic vehicle mobility models and channel measurement results. That would facilitate to both understand the topology characteristics of IVC networks and create a more realistic simulation environment for the testing of network protocols.
Journal Papers:
- C. U. Bas and S. C. Ergen, “Ultra-Wideband Channel Model for Intra-Vehicular Wireless Sensor Networks Beneath the Chassis: From Statistical Model to Simulations”, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2012.
- Y. Sadi and S. C. Ergen, “Optimal Power Control, Rate Adaptation and Scheduling for UWB-Based Intra-Vehicular Wireless Sensor Networks”, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2012.
- S. C. Ergen, A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, X. Sun, R. Tebano, S. Alalusi, G. Audisio and M. Sabatini, “The Tire as an Intelligent Sensor”, IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, vol. 28, no.7, pp. 941-955, July 2009.
- S.C. Ergen and P. Varaiya, “PEDAMACS: Power Efficient and Delay Aware Medium Access Protocol in Sensor Networks”, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol.5, no.7, pp. 920-930, July 2006. (Patented the idea at UC Berkeley)
- S.Y. Cheung, S. Coleri, B. Dundar, S. Ganesh, C.W. Tan and P. Varaiya, “Traffic Measurement and Vehicle Classification with a Single Magnetic Sensor”, Journal of Transportation Research Record, Feb. 2006, no. 1917. (Selected among the papers in 84th Annual Meeting, Transportation Research Board.)