Towards Safety in Automotive Ethernet-based Networks with Dynamic Workloads

The advent of automated and autonomous driving requires decision-making based on high-resolution sensor data. In addition, these systems must react safely and promptly to dynamically changing environmental conditions, e.g. traffic situation, weather etc. In this paper we present the frequently considered isolation mechanisms, standards and concepts for achieving functional safety in automotive systems e.g. 802.1Q, AVB, TSN. However, static configurations, which are introduced by the majority of them, penalizes dynamic communication profiles. Consequently, static network management is no longer sufficient to achieve the required performance level. We show that standardised does not necessarily mean safe "out of the box" nor performant and that the new design vectors must be taken into consideration.