Demonstrator

The Demonstrator presented at the NoAE-Project Day 2012

To prove new commu­nica­tion concepts from experi­ence is one goal of CoRE. Our prototype shows ambitious automotive applications, such as X-by-wire and broadband multimedia, over a flat homogenous in-car backbone network. By using small micro controller based embedded devices also in terms of computational power a realistic scenario is shown.

The prototype was build in 2010 as an interdisciplinary project in association with students from the departments of computer science, mechatronics and mechanical engineering. In spring 2011 it was presented to the community and was shown at national and international events.

To show the use of real-time Ethernet and its capability for multiple communication technologies with different demands in time constraints to coexist on the same physical layer, the demonstrator realizes multiple applications like steer by wire and video. This set-up exemplify the cooperation between algorithms with critical demands in reaction time and video streaming with high demands in bandwidth.

Furthermore with this work we could show bridging technology usable by future migration strategies to successively port hierarchical bus-system architectures used in today’s auto-mobiles to a flat TTEthernet network topology.

The real-time Ethernet stack and all applications are realized on an embedded platform with a low power RISC processor. Therefore this demonstration not only is representative for functionality, but also in financial costs, computational power and energy consumption.

Publication related to prototype:

1. A Real-time Ethernet Prototype Platform for Automotive Applications

   Müller, Kai and Steinbach, Till and Korf, Franz and Schmidt, Thomas C. | sep 2011

   2011 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics - Berlin (ICCE-Berlin)

   Abstract Fulltext Document DOI Bibtex

   @inproceedings{msks-reppa-11, author = {M{\"u}ller, Kai and Steinbach, Till and Korf, Franz and Schmidt, Thomas C.}, title = {{A Real-time Ethernet Prototype Platform for Automotive Applications}}, booktitle = {2011 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics - Berlin (ICCE-Berlin)}, location = {Berlin}, month = sep, year = {2011}, pages = {221--225}, publisher = {IEEE Press}, address = {Piscataway, NJ, USA}, isbn = {978-1-4577-0233-4}, doi = {10.1109/ICCE-Berlin.2011.6031866}, eprinttype = {ieeexplore}, eprint = {6031866}, groups = {own, publications}, langid = {english} }

   The increasing number of driver assistance, infotainment and entertainment systems in automobiles results in higher requirements for bandwidth, fault tolerance and timing behaviour concerning the in-vehicle communication structure. In future, in-vehicle networks based on current technologies will reach their limits due to insufficient scalability and complexity. Real-time (RT) Ethernet is a new, scalable approach to reduce the complexity of these networks significantly. This paper demonstrates the architecture of a RT Ethernet prototype platform based on an ARM centred system-on-chip, which achieves timing and bandwidth characteristics of a typical future automotive application. It is based on an advanced interrupt driven architecture.

Further papers, thesis and reports can be found in the publications section.