A zone-based optical intra-vehicle backbone network architecture with dynamic slot scheduling

Abstract

As Ethernet has a large bandwidth capacity, it is commonly proposed as a backbone for future intra-vehicle networks. However, satisfying the severe hardware reliability requirements of intra-vehicle networks while providing high-bandwidth and low latency by Ethernet may be costly. As a solution, we propose a novel optical intra-vehicle backbone network architecture that may have a lower cost and higher reliability in terms of hardware when compared to Ethernet. However, unlike traditional optical Ethernet architectures, only a single master node has transmitter laser diodes in the backbone of our architecture, so the gateway nodes cannot generate and send packets to the backbone links directly. As the gateways cannot inform the master node and request a slot when they have a new packet to send, a slot scheduling algorithm with polling is necessary to detect and transfer the new packets in the gateways, which may cause higher transmission delays compared to Ethernet. In this paper, we present our optical intra-vehicle backbone network architecture and propose two slot scheduling algorithms. We show that using a dynamic slot scheduling algorithm decreases packet delays when compared to fixed periodic slot scheduling in our architecture. We also evaluate the total delays including traffic shaping and processing delays in an optical TSN Ethernet backbone architecture as a reference. We show that the extra delays due to slot scheduling in our architecture may be negligibly low when compared with traffic shaping and processing delays.