Investigation on the Suitability of Power Line Communication for Redundancy Data Transmission for Automated Driving Functions

Abstract:
With the development of new vehicle architectures supporting autonomous driving functions, the safety requirements regarding the topology for communication systems are increased. These safety-critical systems need to be working reliably in presence of each other as well as the power electronics, especially for SAE J3016 level 4 or 5 architectures. In general, there are different approaches for a safe maneuvering of the vehicle in case of errors in autonomous driving functions. One of them includes the presence of redundant communication systems as a fallback. For this, power line communication (PLC) can offer an economic possibility for such a redundancy system. In this work, the suitability of a PLC system is investigated regarding its susceptibility to pulses, due to fast voltage switching of electric vehicles’ power electronics. In order to simulate these, ISO 7637-3 pulses 3b with pulse repetition rates of typical switching frequencies are coupled onto the communication lines. Then, a comparison to measurements of a 100Base-T1 communication system with a similar setup is made and the properties for both systems are evaluated.