Deterministic Ethernet - High-speed communications with real-time guarantees

Currently, IEEE802 Ethernet standardization is creating a deterministic networking solution for a broad range of high-volume applications including automotive in-vehicle communication and factory automation. New deterministic Ethernet capabilities are based on time-multiplexed bandwidth sharing and defined in the IEEE802.1 TSN (Time-Sensitive Networking) task group. These capabilities enable the design of different classes of industrial and transportation systems and advanced integrated architectures communicating over a single switched Ethernet infrastructure. Together with other industry–specific open standards implemented in network devices, deterministic Ethernet solutions can be designed to satisfy real-time and reliability communication requirements for industrial applications which were constrained by isolated or proprietary networking solutions in the past.
With increasing requirements on high availability, safety, and fail-operational system performance, the network becomes a core component of an embedded platform and determines, and sometimes limits, platform performance and capabilities. Therefore Deterministic Ethernet can be considered a core technology for the design of advanced integrated systems with both synchronous and asynchronous communication. Deterministic full-duplex switched Ethernet networks with time-driven communication capabilities support hard real-time communication, robust synchronization, time-sensitive traffic shaping and policing, and time-partitioning of the network bandwidth. Integrated systems designed with Deterministic Ethernet can host critical and non-critical, or soft-time functions. This enables the design of open and closed systems with critical and hard-real time distributed functions.