Let us talk about Electric vehicles here for a moment. If we were to traverse space and time to reach the past, it would be found that the very first electric vehicle was conceived even before Karl Benz’s first car. While the automobile by Karl Benz was first introduced in 1886, a person by the name of Robert Anderson created the very first electric vehicle in a rudimentary form in 1832. By the 1870s, they were even considered practical. Even though the vehicle itself was considered a wagon that was electrically powered, it certainly did catch the attention of the people at the time. So if we were to compare that vehicle with the EVs we have today, then we’ll realise that the EV produced in 1832 didn’t have many if any, subsystems to help it operate. In contrast, today’s EVs rely heavily on these subsystems to help transmit important information from one component to the other.
From the second the door to the car is opened to enter, right up to the moment the last occupant of the car leaves EV. There is an armada of subsystems that keep a constant track of information and situations around them and then receive information and orders to take actions according to the commands from the onboard brain. An example would be the interior lights turning on as soon as a door is opened or the onboard computer indicating a door that is not shut properly, sometimes even indicating which one.
When we talk about these Car Communication Protocols, there are three distinctions into which these are separated. Those are:
- Application Protocols: these are the subsystems that use the Datalink Protocols as the structure upon which they are built. A few examples of application protocols are MOST (the functions for this are about media-related communications and are chosen over the CAN), J1939, and UDS (this item right here functions as the on-board diagnostics system and uses the aid of CAN as its datalink), etc.
- Datalink Protocols: these datalink protocols exist to manage the functioning of the physical layer of the car. A few choice instances of this can be Ethernet, CAN (otherwise known as a Control Area Network, there are educated guesses that almost all EVs produced today employ CAN services for communication purposes), LIN, UART, Flex-Ray, etc.
After that, how is it decided what protocol should be used for any new feature? Here’s how:
- Fault Tolerance: the question of how sure a person is when data is sent by a sender and received by a receiver precisely. The same is put to rest by this. There are multiple types of error-detecting protocols for different systems.
- Transfer Mode: this is how it’s a decision as to how the transmission of important communique sending protocol is to be done, at full-duplex, half-duplex or Simplex mode.
- The bandwidth of networks: it works to achieve the highest data transmission speeds possible.
- Maximum ‘Payload’ Size: the payload here means the amount of important data one may want to transmit from one end to the other.
