Experimenting with a wireless mesh network towards sensing inside a vehicle's transmission

In this paper we study experimentally a wireless mesh network technology for the purpose of real-time sensing inside a vehicle's transmission. The harsh, highly metallic environment of the vehicle's transmission interior, is a challenging environment for any wireless radio technology-especially when footprint, throughput and cost are among the primary concerns. The wireless mesh network technology in use is Synchronized Flooding (SF), a simulcast based cooperative mesh network proprietary technology that is based on superimposed radio signaling and flooding. We find that SF can potentially provide a robust and reliable solution with a low price tag. We further provide a theoretical intuition why SF is optimal in terms of packet error probability among all retransmission strategies for the in-transmission sensing application.