Early-stage topological and technological choices for TSN-based communication architectures

A main issue in the design of automotive communication architectures is that the most important design choices pertaining to the topology of the networks and the technologies to use (protocols, data rate, hardware) have to be made at a time when the communication requirements are not entirely known. Indeed, many functions only becomes available along the development cycle, and vehicle platforms have to support incremental evolutions of the embedded system that may not be fully foreseeable at the time design choices are made. The problem is becoming even more difficult and crucial with the introduction of dynamically evolving communication requirements requiring network re-configuration at run-time.
We present how the use of synthetic data, that is data generated programmatically based on past vehicle projects and what can be foreseen for the current project, enables the designers to make such early stage choices based on quantified metrics. The proposals are applied to Groupe Renault's FACE service-oriented E/E architecture with the use of a software-implemented function we called “Topology Stress Test”.