Network engineering for real-time networks: Comparison of automotive and aeronautic industries approaches

With the advent of electronic x-by-wire applications with strict reliability and safety requirements, formal verification of safety-critical networks has become an important step of the design process in the automotive and aeronautic industries. We first review in this article the different network technologies and architectures used by both industries. We then present and compare the two prevailing mathematical frameworks used by each industry for validating the correct behavior of a network: schedulability analysis and network calculus. Via an empirical evaluation of both methods in two different use cases, we show the strengths and weaknesses of both methods, and derive a simple guideline on which method to use depending on the type of network used.