Automotive Ethernet, a Holistic Approach for a Next Generation In-Vehicle Networking Standard

For the next-generation in-vehicle networking infrastructure beyond CAN and FlexRay, the automotive industry has identified Ethernet as a very promising candidate. Ethernet being an IEEE standard and commonly used in consumer and industry domains provides a high re-use factor for components, software and tools. In addition, Ethernet has the bandwidth capability that is required for new driver assistance and infotainment systems, for example. However, to become a success story, solutions for the automotive industry have to be further optimised in terms of scalability, low cost, low power and robustness. The first optimisation steps on the physical layer level have already been taken but more innovation needs to be focused on automotive use cases. This paper discusses new network topologies and components and describes an evolutionary path of Ethernet into automotive applications.