Fast Vehicular TSN Network Reconfiguration with Application Aware Network Synchronization

In-Vehicle Networks (IVN) are under intense pressure to be both resource efficient at low cost and flexible enough for the future. The deployment of a large number of new sensors for autonomous driving and self-awareness significantly increases the demand for network resources. In addition, statically designed networks lack flexibility or have large over-provisioning of resources due to the dynamics of network traffic. Application-aware resource management addresses both of these issues. It allows the network to be reconfigured while controlling application requirements, increasing resource utilization, and providing flexibility for future demands. Our timestamp-based reconfiguration protocol ensures fast, lossless reconfiguration of high bandwidth data connections. Based on global time synchronization, it enables precise reconfiguration without increasing the risk of data loss and reduces the risk of inconsistent network configurations by exploiting the object slack created by large object transfers consisting of hundreds of individual packets. Using software-based Linux switches as the network, we demonstrate the use of the reconfiguration protocol under real-world conditions.