Precise real-time monitoring of time-critical flows

Ethernet is increasingly used in areas where time-critical and safety-relevant data are transported over the network along with best-effort flows, for example in intra vehicle networks or industrial networks. The resulting complex network architectures, time-sensitive networking configurations and system interactions are hard to foresee during the design phase. Therefore, it is hard to rule out any violations of flow specifications or timing and reliability requirements, especially in the presence of unpredictable failures. In this work, the design of a flow-oriented network monitoring system for time-sensitive applications is presented. It continuously supervises relevant performance metrics with high precision and short detection delay. Moreover, it allows to check compliance with flow specifications in real-time. Initial evaluations using intra vehicle network traffic yield a high measurement precision.