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Ethernet is the hottest candidate for future in-car communication architecture, promising much higher bandwidth, flexibility and reduced costs. In the coming years, Ethernet will likely evolve from a separate communication medium for special applications like surround-view cameras and infotainment to a central communication infrastructure as a backbone technology. To make this transition, many difficult design decisions have to be made in order to make the technology suitable for the stricter time and safety requirements of todays and future cars. There are a lot of potential real-time effects that must be taken into account. To guide these design decisions, it is necessary to analyze the various architecture concepts with respect to load, performance and real-time capabilities. In this paper, we present different design space axes of Ethernet and propose a methodology of assessing and comparing them.

Due to the increasing integration of safety-critical functionalities into electronic devices, safety-related system design and certification have become a major challenge. Amongst others a suitable reaction of components in case of internal errors must be ensured in order to prevent a function from failing and to guarantee a certain degree of reliability. In this context a wide variety of different fault tolerance mechanisms have been developed in the past, including analytical considerations of error coverage and resulting reliability. However, most of these mechanisms induce a certain timing overhead, which in turn might affect the real-time capabilities of the system in a negative way. More concretely, even if each error is treated adequately such that no logical failure occurs, a timing failure due to missing a deadline cannot be ruled out definitely.