Communication in automotive systems: Principles, limits and new trends for vehicles, airplanes and vessels

This paper deals mainly with state of the art and next-decade technologies for fiber-optic data buses in automotive applications. Nowadays, fiber-optic data buses in automotive applications are exclusively used in the infotainment domain, MOST (Media Oriented System Transport). Current data rates are in the order of 150 MBit/s. Consequently, the use of LEDs and polymer optical fibers (POF) is sufficient. For higher data rates, also alternative solutions are discussed: The LED as transmitter can be replaced by a vertical surface emitting laser (VCSEL), and the plastic fiber (POF) by a polymer-cladded silica (PCS) fiber. Due to the inherent fact that, as a result, the fiber diameter is reduced, the detector area of the well-known Silicon photo diodes can also be reduced greatly. As a consequence, data rates can be extended into the Gbit/s-region. Furthermore there are different physical layers like optical wireless and radio frequency systems (Radar) to be taken into account.