The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) began hosting the Ethernet & IP @ Automotive Technology Day as part of its Industry Connections program in 2014, at a time when the development of technical standards in areas such as connectivity, bridging, security and time-sensitive networking (TSN) were rapidly gathering importance in the automotive market. At the seventh-annual event, which wrapped up Thursday at the San Jose (California) McEnery Conference Center, the criticality of standards and other forms of cross-industry collaboration and cooperation was clear.
In his technical presentation on “Next Gen Automotive Ethernet Functions and the Implementation in an Ethernet MAC,” Harald Zweck with Infineon noted a transition that has played out from the first generation of in-vehicle Ethernet to the second. Early implementations of Ethernet in vehicles was marked by simple data transfers without real-time requirements. Example use cases of second-generation Ethernet implementations, however, are diagnostics and synchronizations reliant on IEEE 802.1AS™ time stamping and memory-to-memory copy leveraging IEEE 802.3™ frame-header filter features and IEEE 802.1Q™ virtual local area network (VLAN) separation and shaper rules.
Global standards such as those in the IEEE 802® family are helping the automotive industry take the step successfully from first- to second-generation in-vehicle Ethernet, Mr. Zweck said: “It was pretty easy to find all of the tools we need to enable this real-time control traffic in an Ethernet-enabled control network.”
Throughout the 2017 IEEE SA Ethernet & IP @ Automotive Technology Day, the role of standards in the development of connected and autonomous vehicles was a recurring theme. IEEE is one of the global standards-development organizations (SDOs) helping to create a foundation of cost-effectiveness, interoperability and shared best practices, on top of which automotive innovation is increasingly taking place.
“Standards development is the core” of what the IEEE SA does, Mr. Schubert said in a presentation. “But these standards have to come from some place.”
Emblematic of IEEE SA engagement in pre-standards development is its Industry Connections Automotive Technology Initiative, which provides a platform bringing together the global technical community working across connected vehicles, electric vehicle (EV) integration and autonomous systems. The initiative provides a collaborative environment to share knowledge, discuss issues and identify standards-related solutions to drive innovation and accelerate emerging technology adoption.
Mr. Schubert invited automotive manufacturers and suppliers, autonomous-vehicle developers, transportation-infrastructure stakeholders and the other attendees in San Jose to engage in the IEEE SA Industry Connections Automotive Emerging Technology Initiative and share their expertise in advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.
More than 300 people spanning many more industries than traditional automotive and networking registered for the 2017 IEEE SA Ethernet & IP @ Automotive Technology Day. Professionals from companies in aerospace and agricultural, construction and forestry machinery, for example, were among those on hand.
The event closed Thursday with technical presentations focused on security, audio video bridging (AVB), switching, validation and testing, TSN, higher-layer protocols and software:
- “Cyber Security Study for Automotive Ethernet in Japan Automotive Industry” by Keisuke Terada of Yazaki—The Japan Automotive Software Platform and Architecture (JASPAR) “represents a collective voice of the Japanese companies at the international standardization bodies” and “contributes to development of global standards.” Priority consideration items for the in-vehicle Ethernet network have been select filtering, Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) and VLANs.
- “Designing for Cost Effective Ethernet Automotive E/E Architecture Against Security Threats,” by Mike Jones and Todd Slack with Microchip—“The attacks here are typically spoofing and flooding … misuse and failures can also look like the network is being flooded.” Ethernet switch security demands “hardware features to support intrusion detection and protection,” as well as the ability to “dynamically update to adapt changing network behavior.”
- “Nonce Misuse-Resistant Authenticated Encryption for Automotive Ethernet” by Mr. Zweck with Infineon—Different cryptographic tools provide different needed security qualities for automotive Ethernet, he said—block cipher delivers confidentiality; hash, integrity, and MAC (medium access control), authenticity and integrity. “AE(AD)—for Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data—provides all three.”
- “Guaranteeing Interoperability of Efficient and Flexible Wake‐up/Sleep in a 100BASE‐T1 Environment” by Philip Axer with NXP Semiconductors and Fabian Nikolaus with C&S Group—Typical automotive networks are heterogeneous, with multiple Ethernet vendors involved. Even in a standards-based environment, “one single specified standard can be interpreted differently by different implementers, because human language itself is ambiguous, … a specified standard might contain coverage gaps/missing details (and/or) the implementer might misunderstand the specification.”
- “Measuring 802.1AS Slave Clock Accuracy” by Alon Regev with Ixia—It is important to test IEEE 802.1AS slave-clock accuracy, and multiple methods for doing so are now defined, including 1PPS (pulse per second), ingress, egress and reverse sync. “Each one of these methods has advantages and disadvantages; there isn’t one of them that shouldn’t be used. We do recommend using multiple methods … to verify results.”
- “Influence of Aging Effects on RF Behavior Including Mode Conversion of STP and UTP Cables” by Josef Ohni and Philipp Numberger with MD Elektronik—The presentation looked at unshielded twisted pair (UTP), shielded twisted pair (STP), stabilized shielded twisted pair (S/UTP), shielded parallel pair (SPP) and coaxial cable. Coating material of UTP is very important on the aging effects, and there is the need of an intermediate jacket, they said, and “when you go for multi-gig (applications), you have to use parallel-pair cables or coax cables.”
- “IEEE 802.1 TSN Standards Overview & Update” by Kevin Stanton with Avnu Alliance—The IEEE 802.1 Time-Sensitive Networking Task Group’s standards and in-development standards in areas such as time-aware shaper, preemption, cyclic queuing and forwarding, per-stream filtering and policing, frame replication and elimination, Enhanced Generic Precise Timing Protocol, Stream Reservation Protocol (SRP) and asynchronous traffic shaping create “a very rich set of tools … the challenge is to decide which ones fit the particular application.”
- “Realizing Automated Driving Systems Using Ethernet TSN and Adaptive AUTOSAR” by Prathap Venugopal with General Motors—“We know that the TSN was engineered to satisfy the automated-driving systems requirements. We saw that the switch vendors seem very interested in providing the solutions based on the requirements of different OEMs. Adaptive AUTOSAR (for “Automotive Open
System Architecture”) currently doesn’t specify TSN support. But, based upon our experience, we believe it is possible to adapt TSN.” - “Using Redundant Data Paths and Clock Domains in Ethernet TSN for Mission‐Critical Network Reliability” by Shrikant Acharya with Excelfore—The presentation outlined requirements of full redundancy in end-to-end, physical network connections across an automobile—loss of any single network link or any network switch is recoverable and preserves guaranteed latency, and loss of any end point does not affect connectivity or latency of other end points. “If you want to have redundancy, it has to be a ground-up concept.”
- “Verification of Time Sensitive Networking Based Ethernet Enabled Automotive Communication Systems” by Wasiq Zia with Cadence Design Systems—High compute power, long-term reliability, operation in extreme climates and higher bandwidth at low power are among the considerable verification challenges. A full-stack verification environment was presented, but “not all layers need be present in every use model—the different functionalities can be selected based on enablement registers.”
Also Thursday, Intrepid Control Systems led some participants through an AVB Boot Camp and hands-on work with technologies such as IEEE 802.1AS Generalized Precision Time Protocol (gPTP), IEEE 802.1Qat™ SRP, IEEE 802.1Qav™ Forwarding and Queuing for Time-Sensitive Streams (FQTSS), IEEE 1722™ Audio Video Transport Protocol (AVTP) and discovery, enumeration and control tailored to automotive applications.
Presentations from the 2017 IEEE SA Ethernet & IP @ Automotive Technology Day are to be made available at the event website.
Read Day 1 at the 2017 IEEE SA Ethernet & IP @ Automotive Technology Day
In recognition and appreciation of their Diamond Sponsorship, IEEE SA recognizes Intrepid Control Systems, Inc.
In recognition and appreciation of their Platinum Sponsorship, IEEE SA recognizes Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
In recognition and appreciation of their Silver Sponsorships, IEEE SA recognizes Broadcom Limited, Microchip Technology Inc., and OmniPHY.
