Design of a Reliable In-Vehicle Network Using ZigBee Communication

This paper presents a new configuration for in-vehicle networks to increase the reliability of the communication between electronic control units (ECU) and to improve the safety level of a vehicle. Basically, the CAN (Controller Area Network) protocol is assumed for the data communication in vehicles but more reliable communication can be guaranteed by adding the ZigBee communication function to each ECU. To show the validity and the performance of the presented network configuration for some network faults, the Electronic Stability Control (ESC) operation is analyzed by using an ECU-In-the-Loop Simulation (EILS). The experimental set-up for EILS of ESC system consists of two 32-bit microcontroller boards which can be communicated with the CAN or the ZigBee protocol. A 7-DOF (Degrees Of Freedom) vehicle model and ESC algorithm is implemented on each microcontroller. It is shown by the experimental results that ESC using the high reliability CAN system can achieve the same performance as using only CAN protocol without disconnected CAN bus.