Multi-Carrier Medium Access Control for In-Vehicle Power Line Communication with Imperfect Sensing

With the rapid growth in the deployment of electronic control units within vehicle, we will witness a tremendous growth in weight, volume, and complexity of the wiring harnesses in vehicles. The use of power lines inside vehicles as a transmission medium, so-called power line communication, is a promising alternative to overcome these issues. In this paper, we present a multi-carrier contention scheme that uses a combination of time and frequency multiplexing. We address physical layer related sensing errors, i.e., false alarm and miss- detection, and obtain the probability of successful transmission and time utilization as a function of these errors. To maximize the probability of successful transmission, we consider a cross-layer approach where the average signal--to--noise ratio and sampling rate in each subcarrier are included in calculating the probability distribution that nodes use to randomly select subcarriers, and sensing threshold that is being employed in each subcarrier. Finally, numerical results are provided to show the performance of the proposed scheme in different scenarios.