The Time-Triggered Ethernet (TTE) Design

Abstract

This paper presents the rational for and an outline of the design of a time-triggered (TT) Ethernet that unifies realtime and non-real-time traffic into a single coherent communication architecture. TT Ethernet is intended to support all types of applications, from simple data acquisition systems, to multimedia systems up to the most demanding safety-critical real-time control systems which require a fault-tolerant communication service that must be certified. TT Ethernet distinguishes between two traffic categories: the standard event-triggered Ethernet traffic and the timetriggered traffic that is temporally guaranteed. The event triggered traffic in TT Ethernet is handled in conformance with the existing Ethernet standards of the IEEE. The design of TT Ethernet has been driven by the requirement of certification of safety-critical configurations and an uncompromising stand with respect to the integration of legacy applications and legacy Ethernet hardware.

Modeling Time-Triggered Ethernet in SystemC/TLM for Virtual Prototyping of Cyber-Physical Systems

“…The academic version uses preemption mechanism and only supports time-triggered (TT) and event-triggered (ET) traffic, while the industrial version uses non-preemptive integration of TT and ET and divides ET into rate-constrained and best-effort traffic classes. In [8], the academic version of TTEthernet is introduced to integrate TT and ET traffic together. In [9], an academic version of TTEthernet switch is developed which preempts ET message transmission when a TT message arrives to guarantee a constant transmission delay of TT messages caused by the switch regardless of the load of ET traffic on the network.…”

Simulation-Based Application Software Development in Time-Triggered Communication Systems

“…It consists of a set of layers, namely the host application layer, the kernel interface layer SKERNELAPI and the runtime kernel layer SKERNEL. The AUTOSAR FlexRay module is the protocol-specific part of the architecture and contains the implementation of the FlexRay Interface for the host application (an implementation of the Time-Triggered Protocol TTP [13] as well as a basic implementation of the Time-Triggered Ethernet (TTE) [11] protocol functions are also available). The mapping of the different software layers to the system model components is also shown in Figure 2.…”

Modular software architecture for flexible reservation mechanisms on heterogeneous resources

“…Some of them have been realized in industrial standards, such as DDS [36], Ethernet Powerlink [16,47], or Profinet IO [40]. The suggested methods usually propose traffic smoothing [30,3] or time-triggered approaches [38,28].…”