Guaranteed Timing Behavior Begins with an Established Ethernet Backbone

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Increasingly, Ethernet is being used in automotive as a vehicle network backbone. It is ideal for service-oriented communications; streamed communications, such as Audio/Video Bridging (AVB) [<span class="xref">1</span>]; and Diagnostics over Internet Protocol (DoIP) [<span class="xref">2</span>] communications - areas in which high-bandwidth and reliable performance are essential.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">Designers are accustomed to network communication systems CAN, LIN, and FlexRay, but how will the timing performance be verified in an Ethernet network? This paper looks at network-wide timing analysis challenges where a mixture of CAN, FlexRay, and Ethernetbased busses co-exist.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">It is also worth noting that the AUTOSAR standard [<span class="xref">3</span>] supports timing definition for all elements in a mixed topology network, but again, accounting for the many different timing paths is a non-trivial process.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph"><figure id="F1" class="figure"><div class="graphic-wrapper"><img class="article-figure figure" src="2016-01-0061_fig0001.jpg" alt="The Ethernet backbone serving different domains."/></div><span class="label">Figure 1</span><figcaption class="caption"><span class="title">The Ethernet backbone serving different domains.</span></figcaption></figure></div><div class="htmlview paragraph">Due to features are distributed in the vehicle, the communication need is typically tightly related to the feature complexity. Also different features have also requirements of isolation from other features, for example infotainment communication may need to be isolated from dynamic chassis control.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">One efficient way to design the topology in the vehicle is to have a backbone with different domain sub-networks (<span class="xref">Figure 1</span>). This allows the designer to isolate different domains and keep control over the communication.</div></div>