Formal worst case performance analysis of time sensitive Ethernet with frame preemption
One of the key challenges in future Ethernet based automotive and industrial networks is the low latency transport of time critical data. To date, Ethernet frames are sent non preemptively. This introduces a major source of delay, as, in the worst case, a latency critical frame might be blocked by a frame of lower priority, which started transmission just before the latency critical frame. The upcoming IEEE 802.3br standard will introduce Ethernet frame preemption to address this problem. While high priority traffic benefits from preemption, lower priority (yet still latency sensitive) traffic experiences a certain overhead, impacting its timing behavior. In this paper, we present a formal timing analysis for Ethernet to derive worst case latency bounds under preemption. We use a realistic automotive Ethernet setup to analyze the worst case performance of standard Ethernet and Ethernet TSN under preemption and also compare our results to non preemptive implementations of these standards.
2016 IEEE 21st International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA)