Intellectual Merit: Modern automobiles increasingly rely on electronics and computing technologies to achieve enhanced vehicle control and intra-vehicle communications capabilities, resulting in large amounts of wiring and placing a considerable engineering burden on the designers of automobiles. Ultra Wide Band radio is a promising technology for intra-vehicle wireless control and communications applications since it is capable of achieving high-speed and robust transmissions within a short distance. However, in-vehicle channels introduce dense and extended multi-path components into received signals, and are sensitive to the movement of drivers and passengers. Hence existing Ultra Wide Band technologies need to be redesigned when applied to an in-vehicle environment. This collaborative project firstly addresses the differential code shifted reference technology to capture more signal energy without performing channel estimation leading to an enhanced bit-error rate performance in a low complexity. Secondly, cognitive Ultra Wide Band radio will be used to proactively eliminate various in-band narrowband interferences. Finally, intra-vehicle control and communications systems necessitate an innovative research strategy and design methodology in order to meet the requirement on the coexistence of reliable real-time control message delivery and high-speed date communications.
Broader Impacts: This collaborative project will improve the education quality of electrical engineering and technology programs by involving undergraduate and graduate students and will attract students, especially those from minority groups, to the fields of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology through seminars and demonstrations. Moreover, the research will help American automotive companies become the worldwide leaders in intra-vehicle wireless control and communications applications, save costs up to billions of dollars per year, enhance the reliability of American made vehicles, offer customers attractive features for informatics and entertainments, and ultimately boost the sales of American automotive products. Lastly, the outcomes of the research can be easily extended to other American industrial sectors, and hence increase the high-tech ingredient of American industry.
The project studied, presented and developed three leading UWB transmission technologies through using differential code shifted reference (DSCR) for enhancing transmission robustness for intra-vehicle control networks, intelligent UWB radio to actively anti-interferences based on orthogonal frequency multiplexing division (OFDM) through awareness and prediction, and time-of-fly (TOF) based on UWB positioning. Meanwhile, the project researched on the modeling of vehicular and outdoor UWB channels based on experimental data as well as developed advanced Doppler shift estimate under high mobility vehicular environments. The project enhanced the intelligence of current UWB radios in their transmission robustness, functionality and adaptivity. The project extended the functions of UWB radios from data transmission only to dual purposes. Moreover, the project indicated the evolution of wireless transmission technology including UWB able to balance between high speed date exchange and reliable real-time control message delivery for a board rang of application including connected and automated vehicles, embedded networks, robots, Internet of things, and wireless networked control systems. The adoption of multiple band OFDM advanced the state-of-art of UWB radio resulting feasible solution for spectrum allocation in cognitive UWB radio. The spectrum awareness of the presented UWB cognitive radio boost the intelligence of environmental awareness, predictability and adaptivity. The presented orthogonal frequency sequence (OFS) performed in the frequency domain for UWB positioning eliminates the physical limitations imposed by operation systems' instruction execution jitters and the complexity of real-time high accurate fast time synchronization. The project enriched the contents of WUB transmission technology. The project further identified the collaboration with local transportation community by offering it with more robust and controllable platforms to meet its stringent requirement of passing safety oriented message successfully before deadlines. The merge of UWB data transmission and positioning facilitates and spawns many new applications. The presented low cost positioning scheme achieves a high granularity of less than 1 meter and has potential to be widely applied in relevant applications that requiring instantaneous local information and data transmission.
