• vehicle
• power line communication

Nowadays, the number of in-vehicle electronic devices is growing exponentially in order to guarantee more security and facilities. However, the use of additional wires for data communication still results in a significant increase in complexity, volume, weight, and fuel consumption that translates to increased emissions and costs. The power line communication is an exciting alternative that offers numerous advantages. This technology reuses the existing direct current (DC) power network in-vehicle as the physical medium for data transmission and allows to eliminate some of the wiring harnesses devoted to conveying data signals. Nevertheless, to provide reliable communication over power lines, several challenges need to be addressed. The MAC layer must be adequately designed to arbitrate the packet transmissions, allowing devices to share a channel efficiently and providing a low collision rate, a high throughput and a low latency. To assess this aim, a discrete-event simulator of power line communication access network in accordance with the IEEE 1901 standard, has been implemented. After the model validation, performances have been evaluated with the aim of applying this setting to the in-vehicle use case. The latency performance of the original IEEE 1901 protocol is not satisfactory for in-vehicle networks. Thus, a Dual Priority mechanism is proposed as an enhancement to the IEEE 1901 Contention Procedure. In conclusion, data obtained from the simulations prove that the DP improvement reduces the latency drastically, increasing throughput and success rate.