Development of a Low-cost Automotive Communications Network Course for EE and ME Students

In today’s modern automobiles, safety, comfort and performance requirements have been constantly increasing. Automotive communication networks are evolving rapidly to assist the increase in bandwidth requirements necessary to support new functionality, interaction between modules and the growing demand for information accessibility. Despite the fact that these communication networks are broadly applied in the automotive industry, the offering of engineering courses in this area is very limited. To address this gap in the curriculum, a new automotive communications network course was developed to educate students in Electrical Engineering (EE) and Mechanical Engineering (ME) programs. This paper provides details on the course content, textbook and reference selection, lab experiments, student feedback and other lessons learned.