Intra-vehicle network routing algorithm for wiring weight and wireless transmit power minimization

As the complexity of vehicular distributed systems increases rapidly, several hundreds of devices (sensors, actuators, etc.) are being placed in a modern automotive system. With the increase in wiring cables connecting these devices, the weight of a car increases significantly, which degrades the fuel efficiency in driving. In order to reduce the weight of a car, wireless communication has been introduced to replace wiring cables between some devices. However, the extra energy consumption for packet transmissions by wireless devices requires frequent maintenance, e.g., recharging of batteries. In this paper, we propose an intra-vehicle network routing algorithm to simultaneously minimize the wiring weight and the transmit power for wireless communication. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively minimize the wiring weight and the transmit power for wireless communication.