Intra-car communications system using radio hose

In order to lower the car's weight, fuel consumption, this paper proposes an intra-car communications system in which the wire harness is replaced with the radio hoses. The proposed intra-car communications system uses a radio hose, a metalized flexible rubber hose that works as an oversized waveguide. The proposed system will provide much higher reliability than conventional wireless communications and also significantly better reliability than wired harness since the broken hoses could be used for communications with high reliability. Although the operating frequencies can be from low to high due to NO RADIATION from the radio hoses, 60 GHz bands have been selected for small and light weight transmitter and receiver implementations followed by microwave frequencies. The propagation experiments have been done on different radiuses, shapes and lengths of hoses in both 60 GHz and microwave. The results show a much lowered path loss of 47 dB at 4 m length, about 33 dB lower from conventional line of sight wireless communications, and a very low delay spread which necessitates neither the use of the OFDM transmission schemes, nor complicated equalizers for Single carrier transmission. These results have proven the high possibility of the proposed radio hose for wireless harness.