"As the number of powerful electronic control units (ECU) and associated distributed sensor and actuator components inside the car keep increasing every year, the manufacturing and installation of wiring harnesses for transmission of data and power for all these components require considerable engineering effort. Eliminating the number of wires can potentially provide cost savings, fuel efficiency due to decreased weight and flexibility to accommodate the growing demand for on-board sensors without adding physical capacity. A great challenge for the wireless communication in intra-vehicle environment is to provide the same level of reliability, end-to-end latency and data rate as that offered by wiring system in transmitting real-time sensing data. A properly selected reliable physical layer technology is crucial in the design and construction of such a network. The first goal of this project is to provide the mathematical model of the intra-vehicle radio frequency (RF) propagation channel crucial for the design of a robust communication system by building an experimental set up on a real car. This will be the first such experimental platform in Europe. Moreover, intra-vehicular wireless sensor networks bring a set of challenges to the protocol design that have not been investigated before. Unlike unattended wireless sensor networks, energy-efficiency is not the only major challenge. The high level of reliability may require error rate of 10^-8 for mission critical applications whereas the latency and data rate requirements of automotive sensors cover a wide spectrum. The second goal of this project is to build the first systematic methodology to MAC protocol design that considers all possible intra-vehicle sensor applications together based on a deep analysis of their requirements for delay, throughput and reliability."