Preprints RTN ' 2011 10 th International Workshop on Real - Time Networks

The spreading of Ethernet as an in-vehicle network for today’s cars or those in the near future is being broadly announced by spokespersons for major carmakers and automotive electronics companies. Even in the scientific community there is a growing interest in the topic, as is shown by the increasing number of studies that address the performance of Switched Ethernet or Time-Triggered Ethernet in automotive embedded systems. Several factors seem to favour the introduction of Ethernet technology in the automotive communication systems arena. Some of them are similar to those that, ten years ago, motivated the interest towards the introduction of Ethernet in automation as either a complement or replacement of traditional fieldbuses. The main motivation is the higher bandwidth provided by Ethernet (100 Mbps) as compared to current in-car networks. Such an increased bandwidth paves the way for applications, like advanced driver assistance systems, which make the volume of exchanged data in automotive communication continuously grow. Other enabling factors for using Ethernet as automotive communication network are the assessed technology and the support offered to the Internet Protocol stack (IP). The Diagnostics over Internet Protocol (DoIP) standard, currently under specification as ISO 13400, will foster the use of Ethernet as a replacement for CAN for the reprogramming (flashupdate) and in-car diagnostics of automotive Electronic Control Units (ECUs). With Internet connectivity, the IP protocol will be used in-car, opening the way to enhanced navigation functionalities, remote diagnostics and location-based services. In addition to the above mentioned features, Ethernet technology is scalable, thus meeting the scalability requirement imposed by today’s automotive systems, where the number of nodes to interconnect steadily increases. The automotive domain is however quite different from automation environments. An in-car embedded system is typically divided into several functional domains, that feature different requirements and specific constraints.In this context, the talk will discuss how and to what extent Ethernet technology is likely to step in and provide benefits to the different automotive functional domains. The potential for making Ethernet a complement or even replacement to other network technologies in their respective functional domain will be addressed. The talk will consider the TTEthernet protocol, as its design provides several appealing features for automotive communication, such as, determinism, fault-tolerance, independence of fault-containment regions, fault-tolerant global time, and legacy Ethernet integration. Recent works, in fact, addressed performance evaluation of TTEthernet. The talk will both summarise significant results from related works and present new performance results obtained in some selected case studies. Finally, some directions for further investigation into the adoption of Ethernet in cars will be given, with some reference to running projects.