Optical Communications in Autonomous Driving Vehicles: Requirements, Challenges, and Opportunities

The automotive industry is currently undergoing a revolution. Electrification, automation, and connectivity become major trends in future vehicles. Autonomous driving vehicles require a variety of sensors to perceive their surroundings and rely on high-speed and reliable intra-vehicle networks (IVNs) for data transmission. As the number and performance of sensors increase and the IVN evolves from distributed architecture to domain centralized and zone centralized architecture, the demand for IVN data rates escalates. Optical fiber communication is a promising solution in IVN due to its high bandwidth, light weight, and good electromagnetic compatibility. However, the harsh environment in vehicles such as wide temperature range, vibration, dust and grease contamination poses a great challenge to employ optical fiber communication in IVN. To tackle this issue, novel intra-vehicle optical network configurations and technologies have been proposed. In addition, the development of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication technology will further improve road safety and traffic efficiency. Optical wireless communication can offer advantages over radio frequency technology for V2X communication.