Deterministic Communications for In-vehicle Network:
Overview and Challenges
Chengmin Zhang
Tsinghua Shenzhen International
Graduate School, Tsinghua University,
Shenzhen, China
zcm20@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn
Wei Zhou
Tsinghua Shenzhen International
Graduate School, Tsinghua University,
Shenzhen, China
w-zhou18@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn
Yuting Yin
Tsinghua Shenzhen International
Graduate School, Tsinghua University,
Shenzhen, China
yinyt20@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn
Zhiheng Li
Tsinghua Shenzhen International
Graduate School, Tsinghua University,
Shenzhen, China
zhhli@sz.tsinghua.edu.cn
Jinfeng Gong
China Automotive Technology and
Research Center, Tsinghua University,
Tianjin, China
gongjinfeng@catarc.ac.cn
Kai Zhang
Tsinghua Shenzhen International
Graduate School, Tsinghua University,
Shenzhen, China,
zhangkai@sz.tsinghua.edu.cn,
Corresponding author
ABSTRACT
In recent years, intelligence has become an inevitable trend in the
development of automobile industry, and advanced assistant driv-
ing or autonomous driving are important features of automobile
intelligence. The increasing level of self-driving puts forward higher
demands for in-vehicle communication. And traditional in-vehicle
networks are dicult to cover a series of complex deterministic
communication requirements including high-bandwidth, low la-
tency, low jitter and zero congestion. Therefore, Automotive Ether-
net technology came into being. IEEE developed a series of Time
Sensitive Networks (TSN) standard protocols based on traditional
Ethernet. TSN added a series of key mechanisms that provide real-
time and reliability guarantees for data transmission. In this paper,
we reviewed the evolution of in-vehicle networks and outlined the
development of Time Triggered Ethernet (TTE) and TSN researches
in recent years. We also discussed the importance of determinis-
tic researches on in-vehicle networks and the challenges in the
development of the Internet of Things, E/E (Electrical/Electronic)
architectures, intelligent driving, and new energy vehicles.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Information systems → Information systems applications.
KEYWORDS
Deterministic communication, TSN, TTE, in-vehicle network, 5G
ACM Reference Format:
Chengmin Zhang, Wei Zhou, Yuting Yin, Zhiheng Li, Jinfeng Gong,
and Kai Zhang. 2021. Deterministic Communications for In-vehicle Net-
work: Overview and Challenges. In 2021 2nd International Conference
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed
for prot or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation
on the rst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM
must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish,
to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specic permission and/or a
fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.
ICAIIS ’21, May 28–30, 2021, Chongqing, China
© 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9020-0/21/05.. . $15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3469213.3471361
on Articial Intelligence and Information Systems (ICAIIS ’21), May 28–
30, 2021, Chongqing, China. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 6 pages. https:
//doi.org/10.1145/3469213.3471361
1 INTRODUCTION
In the 21st century, intelligence has become the strategic direction
of today’s automobile development. At present, various global au-
tomakers and information technology companies including BMW,
Audi, Ford, Tesla, and Baidu have invested heavily in manufactur-
ing and testing autonomous vehicles [
1
]. Controller Area Network
(CAN) bus is now widely used in vehicle network technology. It
adopts a bus-type topology, and all nodes that can participate in in-
formation exchange are mounted on the same bus, thereby greatly
reducing the number of wiring harnesses. At the same time, CAN
can provide a bus transfer rate of up to 1Mbps, which is enough
to meet the needs of in-vehicle networks at that time, so CAN has
been widely used in in-vehicle networks. At the same time, for
some applications in automobiles that do not require high commu-
nication bandwidth, protocols such as LIN have also appeared to
ll the corresponding needs. In recent years, with the increasing
number of ECU, the rapid growth of information transmission, and
the emergence of intelligent applications, traditional CAN-based
automotive bus systems have become increasingly dicult to meet
a series of complex high-bandwidth, low-time Delay the determin-
istic communication requirements [2].
People have gradually realized the potential of Ethernet in the fu-
ture in-vehicle network, and Automotive Ethernet technology has
emerged [
2
][3]. Ethernet has huge preponderance of high band-
width, low cost, standardization and mature technology. However,
the electromagnetic pollution caused by the excessive radio fre-
quency noise of 100Mbps and above Ethernet will cause damage
to the electronic components in the car, which does not meet the
requirements of the automotive industry for electromagnetic inter-
ference. Automotive Ethernet is dierent from traditional Ethernet
that is a up-to-date type of local area network technology. It is used
to connect various electrical and electronic components in the vehi-
cle. It can reach 100Mbps-1Gbp transmission rate with only a single
pair of unshielded twisted pair, which not only greatly reduces
the weight of the wire harness, but also meets the requirements