Intra-car multihop wireless sensor networking: a case study

Modern vehicles incorporate dozens of sensors to provide vital sensor data to electronic control units, typically through physical wires, which increase the weight, maintenance, and cost of cars. Wireless sensor networks have been contemplated for replacing the current physical wires with wireless links, although existing networks are all single-hop, presumably because cars are small enough to be covered by lowpower communication, and multihop networking requires organizational overhead. In contradiction with previous works, we experimentally investigate the use of multihop wireless communication to support intra-car sensor networking. Extensive tests, run under various vehicular environments, indicate the potential for significant reliability, robustness, and energy usage improvements over existing single-hop approaches. Our implementation is based on the Collection Tree Protocol, a state-of-the-art multihop data collection protocol.