Next Generation Intra-Vehicle Backbone Network Architectures

Increasing bandwidth requirements in vehicles are pushing the backbone architectures to use faster switching technologies like Ethernet. However, the traditional Ethernet cannot satisfy the strict latency requirements in a vehicle. As a solution, switched Ethernet variants like Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and Audio Video Bridging (AVB) are being standardized for automotive Ethernet. Moreover, it is expected that the intra-vehicle backbone architectures will shift to a zonal architecture for more centralizing the processing and decreasing the costs. In this paper, we present the recent trends, advances and challenges in intra-vehicle backbone networks. Moreover, we compare a TSN+AVB Ethernet backbone architecture with an alternative cut-through switching optical backbone network architecture by simulation and show that the cut-through switching optical architecture may achieve lower latency.