Real-time capable CAN to AVB ethernet gateway using frame aggregation and scheduling

Ethernet is a key technology to satisfy the communication requirements of future automotive embedded systems. Audio/Video Bridging (AVB) Ethernet is a set of IEEE standards that allows synchronous and time-sensitive communication. It is the favored candidate for backbone and camera applications, but is not expected to replace Controller Area Network (CAN). Instead, both have to coexist in future architectures. No research has been conducted regarding CAN to AVB gateways, and approaches for similar protocols are either not fit or inefficient. In this paper, we present a CAN to AVB Ethernet gateway that allows efficient, real-time capable forwarding. We aggregate and schedule multiple CAN frames into a single AVB Ethernet frame to minimize bandwidth requirements. We evaluate static and dynamic scheduling approaches and determine optimal gateway configurations, showing that the necessary bandwidth reservation is reduced by 72% compared to similar approaches.