Due to concerns about the negative impacts of powering vehicles using fossil fuel and the future availability of fossil fuel, there has been an increased focus on electric vehicles. However, current electric vehicle energy efficiency is a key problem as these vehicles are not as efficient as fossil-fueled vehicles.
One way of decreasing a vehicle’s energy consumption is to reduce the weight of the vehicle, while still ensuring the safety and reliability of the vehicle. Controller Area Network (CAN) systems have been used in vehicles to realize real-time applications, however the low peak data rates of CAN have begun to limit the applications that can be realized.
This bachelor’s thesis project focuses on secure communication within a vehicle using Ethernet. Additionally, the use of Power over Ethernet can be used for powering some of the network attached devices within the vehicle. The goal is to reduce the number of components and the weight of the vehicle while continuing to ensure the security and reliability of the communication – even when the network grows in size (either in physical size or in number of connected devices).
This thesis shows that an Ethernet based system can serve as a possible replacement candidate for the CAN system due to its low latencies and high bandwidth. Ethernet is also a very scalable system with none of the limitations that a CAN system have.
Source: KTH
Author: Ekman, Rasmus