An Automotive Communication Bus Using OFDMA

Today’s automotive communication systems use baseband pulse modulation and time-division or carrier-sense multiple access. In future in-vehicle networks, more devices need to be connected in a multipoint-to-multipoint topology. We have developed a new automotive bus system based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) enabling better channel adaptation and fine-granular multi-user access. We highlight the advantages of OFDMA in automotive and industrial applications, introduce our system concept and demonstrate its feasibility by means of a prototype. Finally, we discuss the use of electrical and optical media.