This research addresses the development of a lightweight and reliable wireless Controller Area Network (Wireless-CAN) architecture for future in-vehicle networks. The motivation of this study arises from the rapid increase in electronic control units (ECUs), sensors, and actuators in modern vehicles, which has led to growing wire-harness mass, higher packaging complexity, and increased design burden. Since the wire harness accounts for a meaningful portion of total vehicle weight and occupies limited installation space within the vehicle body, reducing part of the in-vehicle wiring while maintaining communication reliability has become an important research challenge. In this context, partially wireless in-vehicle communication is a promising approach, but it must satisfy the strict reliability requirements historically achieved by wired CAN, especially for safety-critical and high-priority traffic.

To address this problem, this study developed an integrated Simulink-based Wireless-CAN model that jointly evaluates the physical layer and medium access control (MAC) layer. At the physical layer, the research adopts Filter Bank Multi-Carrier with Offset Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (FBMC-OQAM). FBMC is a multicarrier transmission scheme that applies well-shaped prototype filters to each subcarrier, achieving stronger frequency localization than OFDM. Unlike OFDM, which relies on a cyclic prefix (CP) to handle delay spread and therefore sacrifices part of the effective transmission efficiency, FBMC does not require a CP and can offer better spectral efficiency and improved coexistence with neighboring wireless systems. These properties are especially attractive for in-cabin wireless communication, where spectrum use is limited and coexistence with other 2.4 GHz devices is a practical concern.

However, directly applying a conventional FBMC waveform designed for general broadband systems is not well suited to short-frame in-vehicle communication. A key issue is that the long filter tail of standard FBMC can cause inter-frame interference in the presence of multipath and external interference, which is particularly harmful in confined vehicle environments. To overcome this, the study proposes an automotive-oriented FBMC waveform design that introduces guard OQAM symbols at the frame boundary and employs a tail-compressed prototype filter. The guard symbols create a protected region that absorbs the filter tail and suppresses leakage into subsequent frames, while the redesigned filter improves time localization and reduces excessive temporal spreading. In this way, the proposed signal design retains the intrinsic advantages of FBMC while making it more suitable for low-latency and reliable in-vehicle communication.

At the MAC layer, the study further introduces Priority-aware Redundant Diversity (PRD), a mechanism inspired by the priority-control principle of CAN. PRD selectively applies limited redundancy only to high-priority traffic when the channel condition deteriorates, thereby enhancing the reliability of safety-relevant frames without imposing unnecessary overhead on lower-priority traffic. Through this cross-layer design, the study shows that a combination of waveform-level robustness and priority-aware MAC control can support the feasibility of Wireless-CAN as a future solution for lightweight and reliable in-vehicle networks.