Advances in automotive technology require networks to support a variety of communication requirements, such as reliability, real-time performance, low jitter, and strict delay limits. Time-Sensitive Network (TSN) is a keyframe transmission delay-guaranteed solution based on the IEEE 802 architecture of the automotive Ethernet. However, most of the existing studies on automotive TSN performance are based on a single mechanism, lacking a complete and systematic research tool. At the same time, the design method should be considered from a global perspective when designing an automotive TSN system, rather than only considering a single mechanism that TSN applies to. This paper discusses the correspondence between traffic types and automotive scenarios and proposes a methodology to target the delay constraint of traffic types as the design goal of automotive TSN networks. To study the performance of automotive TSN under different mechanisms such as time-aware shaper (TAS), credit-based shaper (CBS), cyclic queuing and forwarding (CQF), etc., this paper also develops a systematic automotive TSN simulation system based on OMNeT++. The simulation system plays a crucial role in the whole methodology, including all applicable TSN standards for the automotive field. Lastly, a complex automotive scenario based on zonal architecture provided by a major motor company in Shanghai is analyzed in the simulated system; verifying TSN can guarantee real-time performance and reliability of the in-vehicle network.
Keywords: OMNeT++; automotive Ethernet; communications simulation; time-sensitive network; traffic scheduling.