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With the rapid advances of information technology, including computing, sensing, and communication, engineers are looking for creative approaches to migrate wired system applications into wireless domain. Recently, industry has been exploring the deployment of wireless technologies into harsh environments; it is, however, facing many challenges to accommodate its stringent requirements and applications' constraints. With such a trend towards a wireless world and with the theme of easy-to-upgrade and low cost in-vehicle networks, the idea of wireless in-vehicle multiplexed networks becomes even more attractive. This paper reviews different standard wireless protocols such as IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15.1/Bluetooth®, and IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee®. Afterwards, it discusses the potential role of these protocols in the future in-vehicle wireless network. And finally, it provides a performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee for in-vehicle networks.

Over 42,000 deaths have occurred on highways in the United States during calendar year 2002 [1]. One way to achieve a safe highway environment is using a communication system that allows all vehicles on the highway or road to share their data so they can warn each other about dangerous situations and plan for safe driving activities. One problem to be addressed in such a system is dividing the vehicles on the highway into groups-of-interest, where vehicles that may need cooperation among each other to perform safe driving maneuvers comprise a group-of-interest. This paper proposes a location matrix-based algorithm to define the peer space (group-of-interest); that is, vehicles on the highway are encapsulated in matrices, and all maneuvers are planned in a cellular fashion using the Dynamic Service Discovery (DSD) -based Jini protocol as an ad-hoc network communication protocol.

Vehicles are becoming part of the Internet, either as a terminal in a mobile network, as a network node or as a moving sensor (providing environmental, car status or video information). Interest of vehicles' passengers in location-based information is steadily growing. Moreover drivers and passengers may like to receive information about traffic jams or accidents in their vicinity, or chat with other vehicle's passengers. Enabling communication among automobile nodes (cars) is not a straightforward task. Such nodes form an extremely dynamic ad hoc network, and this presents some technical challenges. One essential characteristic of such networks is that the available services are in principle unknown to a node. A Dynamic Discovery Service (DDS) protocol to discover nodes is needed.

In the near future, vehicles are expected to become a part of the Internet, either as a terminal in a mobile network, as a network node, or as a moving sensor (providing environmental information, cars status, streaming video, etc.) or a combination of the three. This is partly due to the steadily growing interest of vehicles' passengers in location-based information. Drivers and passengers that would want to receive information about traffic jams or accidents in their vicinity will likely be interested in accessing Internet services from within the vehicular network. Access can be gained by using roadside installed Internet Gateways (IGs), which are able to communicate with the vehicles. When the car network is connected to the Internet, it is important for the vehicle to detect available gateways providing access to the Internet. Therefore, a gateway discovery mechanism is required.

The widespread deployment of inexpensive communications technology, computational resources in the networking infrastructure, and network-enabled end-devices pose an interesting problem: how does one locate a particular network service or a device out of millions of accessible services and devices? Traditionally, these services are accessed through well-known URLs or retrieved through search engines. However, these results tend to be very general and may not satisfy the requirements of the user. Moreover, the traditional model cannot react to the dynamic changes in service attributes and client parameters. As a solution, a secure directory tool that tracks services in the network and allows authenticated users to locate them through expressive queries can be used. This paper discusses the Next Generation Vehicle Network (NGVN), an architecture based on Java/Jini and Dynamic Discovery Service (DDS) technology.

The automobile currently has a number of processors to control different subsystems such as engine controller, transmission controller, ABS controller, lighting controller, entertainment controller, and airbag controller. These subsystems are connected as a single vehicle network. Different vehicle networks can run under different protocols such as CAN, VAN, SCP, DLC, ACP, and J1939. Controller Area Network (CAN) has become the standard for the automotive industry. However, CAN has limited speed to incorporate new applications, such as invehicle multimedia, entertainment, navigation, and computing. A new technology, Media Oriented Systems Transport (MOST), provides high bandwidth to accommodate such applications.

The increasing trend of automotive electronics mandates the introduction of multiple processors in automotive electronics. The automotive electronic systems have to operate in harsh environments having a high temperature range, high humidity, unpredictable vibrations and rapid voltage variation. In such environment, the automotive electronic systems become vulnerable to intermittent and transient failures. Depending upon the importance of the tasks performed by the processor, a processor’s failure inside automotive electronic system may lead to serious consequences. Fault tolerant computing techniques are used to keep the computer systems running in spite of one or more processors’ failures. The concept of fault tolerant is well known in many applications such as airplanes, industry, and military. However, the question of fault tolerant design has drawn little attention in automotive electronics.

Automotive multiplexing allows sharing information among various intelligent modules inside an automotive electronic system. In order to achieve an optimum functionality, the information should be exchanged among various electronic modules in real time. New features are introduced in automobiles such as Intelligent Vehicle Highway System (IVHS), intelligent transportation support system, engine immobilizers, night vision assistance system, and automated collision avoidance and notification system. The inclusion of such features increases the data traffic over the multiplexing bus. Also, these features require very high speed and expensive bus. Data reduction techniques are used to send the data over a transmission media at high speed. Using the data reduction techniques, we will be able to include new features in automobiles without the need of a high speed bus. Since the automotive environment is different, a special data reduction algorithm is mandated.

Automotive electronics can be divided into subsystems according to their functions and physical locations Employing this concept, a hierarchical architecture of automotive electronics may be evolved In this paper a hierarchical fault tolerant distributed processing system has been introduced The system consists of a central controller (CC), m subsystems, a main bus and a shared memory module Each subsystem consists of n processors, one smart sensor group and one smart actuator group The central controller maintains the performance history of every processor in system In case of a processor's failure, the CC assigns the tasks of the faulty processor to another processor within the same subsystem Reliability, which is the probability of a correctly working system for an interval of time [t-t0], has been evaluated An algorithmic approach based on the truth table method has been developed for evaluating the reliability of the proposed hierarchical architecture A comparison of the reliability calculation has been done between the proposed architecture and a system without fault tolerance capability The results show that the proposed architecture provides better reliability

Distributed Computing systems consist of several processors that interact and cooperate with each other by message passing. These distributed systems provide many attractive features such as fault tolerance, resource sharing, high reliability and high throughput. These features make distributed systems good candidates for many real time applications such as aircraft, space crafts and automotive control. Car Industry is striving to provide reliable and cost effective Computing systems for their automobiles. As the number of processors increases in a vehicle, the demand increases to provide a reliable Computing system for the automotive. Therefore, it is important to develop specialized distributed Computing systems for this type of applications taking into consideration reliability as well as cost of the system. In this paper, a distributed Computing system architecture has been proposed for automotive applications.

Traditional climate controller process depends upon the establishment of a mathematical model. Expert systems were created to mimic the behavior of a skilled human operator for those processes too complex to be mathematically modeled in real time[1]. Fuzzy logic inference engine use an expert system paradigm for automatic process control[2], and have been successful in controlling climate for a vehicle controller. Recently, there has been many practical applications of fuzzy control. Applications of fuzzy control to vehicles become more attractive. In this paper we implemented fuzzy logic based climate controller using software develpment tool (MATLAB).