Gateway Strategies for Embedding of Automotive CAN-Frames into Ethernet-Packets and Vice Versa

Today's automotive communication architectures are composed of up to five special purpose communication technologies with dedicated features to interconnect hundreds of comfort-, safety-, and infotainment-related distributed functions. In the future, the number and complexity of such highly distributed functions will further increase and the outcome of this are stronger requirements to the underlying communication architectures. Ethernet and IP, both standardized and widely used in other industrial sectors, could be one solution to handle the upcoming requirements and could homogenize the variety of communication technologies. This paper focuses on a transformation concept to connect a CAN-based network to an Ethernet/IP-based network and vice versa. It highlights several variants which optimize different objectives, like the protocol header overhead or the latency of messages. Moreover, it presents measured results for different network utilizations and a currently deployed automotive CAN subnetwork.