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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.

Vehicle communication networks are challenged by increasing demands for bandwidth, safety, and security. New data is coming into the vehicle from personal devices (e.g. mobile phones), infotainment systems, camera-based driver assistance, and wireless communication with other vehicles and infrastructure. Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) provides high levels of bandwidth and security, making it a potential solution to the challenges of vehicle communication networks. However, in order to be used in control applications, Ethernet must provide known timing performance (e.g. bounded latency and jitter), and in some cases redundancy. This paper explores use of Ethernet for in-vehicle control applications.