Performance Analysis of Protocol Stack for Inter-Processor Ethernet Communication in Automotive Industry

In modern cars, Electronic Control Units (ECUs) can have more than one CPU which can exchange data over built-in communication network. Since majority of these ECUs can be categorized as real-time system, special attention should be given to the communication performance between processors. In this paper, analysis of TCP/IP protocol stack for 100 Base-TX Ethernet used for Inter-Processor communication for a specific system on a chip is given. The analysis is performed regarding throughput, goodput and latency from application layer using a test application. On the transport layer UDP was used. The obtained results revealed the impact of the Linux scheduler on the performance of data sending. Apart from that, an optimal packet size was determined by taking into account obtained latency and throughput.