Application and realization of gateways between conventional automotive and IP/ethernet-based networks

In order to fulfill the continuously rising communication demands within vehicles the usage of Ethernet as vehicle network is planned, since it is offering high bandwidth, robustness and has a high market penetration. The automotive industry has strong requirements with respect to safety and reliability; hence the introduction of new technologies is usually done in an evolutionary approach. This implies that for the introduction of Ethernet a gateway to currently existing automotive networking technologies is required for achieving a smooth migration. Within this paper a concept for such a gateway maintaining the Quality of Service (QoS) offered by the existing automotive networks is proposed. In order to support the same level of QoS the usage of Ethernet Audio Video Bridging (AVB) is suggested. The implementation of such a QoS gateway is investigated specifically for the automotive networks MOST and FlexRay. For evaluation of the proposed concepts a validation system was built up, and promising results showing the feasibility of such a QoS gateway have been achieved. Furthermore this implies that AVB has the capability to replace other automotive network technologies in the midterm.