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Modern cars now come with sophisticated telemetry which often involve connecting to the internet over mobile telephone networks or Wi-Fi. The telemetry or cloud functions of the car is typically handled by a Telematics Control Unit or the Infotainment System. The microcontrollers (Host Processor) powering the ECUs are very powerful and often have operating systems such as Linux or QNX to drive the large displays or perform modem functionalities. These powerful microcontrollers take several seconds to startup and does not offer hard real-time performance - both of which are critical to handle the vehicle CAN network. Hence, it is common to include a less powerful microcontroller to the ECU to perform the management of the vehicle CAN network. These smaller microcontrollers (Vehicle Processor) can startup fast and provide hard real-time performance.

In the past decade automobiles have evolved from mechanical devices into very complex electro-mechanical systems. With the increasing number of ECUs comes the complexity of connecting them to have a meaningful interaction with the rest of the system. In this scenario there is no one size fits all approach. ECUs have different communication requirements based on bandwidth, reliability, speed and security. Infotainment ECUs need high bandwidth to stream the audio and video content but can be tolerant to frame drops and latency. Engine Control ECUs need less bandwidth but must have high reliability. Hence, when it comes to In-Vehicle network a variety of networks co-exist such as Ethernet, CAN and MOST serving various purposes. This paper attempts to make a case to add low power wireless network to the mix to optimize the space and cost factor and looks at applications that are appropriate for such networks.