Performance assessment of the IEEE 802.1Q in automotive applications

Ethernet is nowadays a promising communication technology for automotive applications as, comparing with the existing in-vehicle networks, it offers high bandwidth and a significant reduction of cabling costs, while meeting the EMC/EMI requirements of automotive communications. The IEEE 802.1Q standard is one of the base standards of Time-Sensitive Networking. It offers several benefits, such as the real-time support, as it provides bounded latency to time-constrained traffic classes, with zero jitter and congestion-free transmissions, and the capability to handle multiple traffic classes on the same channel. The IEEE 802.1Q standard specifies multiple features, that support different ways to handle the transmission of Ethernet frames. In this paper a comparative performance assessment of three network configurations defined in the IEEE 802.1Q standard for automotive applications are presented. The assessment results are obtained using the OMNeT++ framework. The comparison between the results of these three different network configurations, using realistic traffic patterns, provides a quantitative evaluation of the network performance in terms of maximum end-to-end delays and absolute jitter.