Connecting to sensors a few meters away from the microcontroller
One approach is to take a bus such as SPI or UART and use LVDS/RS-485/RS-422 transcievers with properly terminated twisted pairs.

Or you can use a more standard bus such as CAN or Ethernet. 

Data rate, synchronization requirements, necessity for noise immunity and error correction, galvanic isolation (or not) and so on will tend to push towards one solution or another. It's usually not worth it to invent a new protocol if you can use or adapt an existing protocol.