Ethernet in Cars, enabling self-driving functionality

Abstract

Notwithstanding the fact that Ethernet has been with us for a very long time, it was never used in cars until recently. This is because, Ethernet didn t meet the Original Equipment Manufacturer s (OEM s) re- quirement for automotive, Ethernet could not guarantee latency down to the low microsecond; For now, there are a lot of standards and protocols that has been put in place to deal with some of these requirements. There is the need for higher bandwidth and low latency in cars due to the rise in driver assistance systems and infotainment systems but the current standards cannot meet this demand. Very soon, current trends of network technologies used in the automotive industry such as: Controller Area Network (CAN), Local Interconnect Network(LIN), Multimedia Oriented Systems Transport (MOST), FlexRay, Low Voltage Differential Signaling (LVDS) will reach their limits due to insufficient bandwidth, scalability and complexity. These are some of the reasons why Ethernet is such a big deal in the automotive industry. This paper is focused on IEEE Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) Task Group , one of the competing real-time approaches to the adoption of Ethernet in cars.The paper investigates on how TSN standards including IEEE 802.1Qbv Time-aware shaping (per-queue based) Scheduled traffic, IEEE 802.1ASrev Timing and synchronization, IEEE 802.1Qbu frame Pre-emption, IEEE 802.1Qci Per-stream filtering and policing and others can be used to satisfy the requirement of time-critical applications in the automotive industry.