Coexistence of time-triggered and event-triggered traffic in switched full-duplex ethernet networks

In the recent years, the Ethernet technology has grown rapidly, mainly due to its applicability in local area networks. High data rates, low cost, collision reduction with the full-duplex approach and the elimination of chaining limits inherent in hubbed Ethernet networks have made the switched Ethernet a dominant network technology. Although the switch technology has improved significantly, the delays appearing in the switches are still not acceptable for time critical applications. This is specially the case when several cascaded switches are applied. Within the scope of developing a new network architecture for the in-vehicle communication, the time constraints of a switched Ethernet network are addressed in this paper. In order to comply with the delay bounds of time critical applications in the automotive field, a cost-effective approach is proposed and analyzed for several cascaded switches.