Design Of The Time-Triggered Ethernet Switch

In recent years, the use of Ethernet in aerospace and industrial fields for real-time, reliable and safety-critical systems has become a research hotpot. Due to its benefits of high bandwidth, low cost and compatible with traditional Ethernet devices, Time-Triggered Ethernet(TTE) draws people’s great attention and has been applied to aerospace and car manufacture.Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) issued open standard AS6802 in 2011 for TTE, attends to improve the traditional Ethernet, makes it support real-time, deterministic communication, to meet the needs of aerospace, rail transportation, industrial automation and control fields as real-time, secure, high-speed communications.In this paper, methods of study, research, analysis and simulation are applied to make a deep research in TTE. First, the background and current research status at home and abroad are introduced. Secondly, according to the requirements of real-time application’s data transmission, a kind of TTE that suits for cross-industrial field is introduced and the principle of TTE’s data transmission, data exchange and time synchronization are elaborated. Then, a general framework design is proposed for the TTE’s switching unit:Time-Triggered Ethernet switch. Modules of the switch are designed and function model of them are made. Finally, the design is simulated, and the feasibility of this design is analyzed based on the simulation result.At the end, some questions about this article are raised, such as the schedule algorithm bandwidth utilization problems and the interface’s design which is between the switch and central guardian, and the future research direction is pointed out for reference.