Deterministic Intra-Vehicle Communications: Timing and Synchronization

Abstract: As we power through to the future, in-vehicle communications reliance on speed is becoming a challenging predicament. This is mainly due to the ever-increasing number of electronic control units (ECUs), which will continue to drain network capacity, hence further increasing bandwidth demand. For a wired network, a tradeoff between bandwidth requirement, reliability, and cost-effectiveness has been our main motivation in developing a high-speed network architecture that is based on the integration of two time-triggered protocols namely; Time Triggered Ethernet (TT-E) and Time Triggered Controller Area Network (TT-CAN). Therefore, as a visible example of an Internet of Vehicles technology, we present a time triggered communication-based network architecture. The new architecture can provide scalable integration of advanced functionalities, while maintaining safety and high reliability. To comply with the bandwidth requirement, we consider high-speed TT-Ethernet as the main bus (i.e., backbone network) where sub-networks can use more cost-effective and lower bandwidth TT-CAN to communicate with other entities in the network via a gateway. The main challenge in the proposed network architecture has been to resolve interoperability between two entirely different time-triggered protocols, especially in terms of timing and synchronization. In this paper, we first explore the main key drivers of the proposed architecture, which are bandwidth, reliability, and timeliness. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of our gateway design in providing full interoperability between the two time-triggered protocols.