Converging PCIe and TSN Ethernet for Composable Infrastructure in High-Performance In-Vehicle Embedded Systems

Costs and risks of implementing High-Performance Embedded Systems such as Centralized Car Servers for Autonomous Vehicles can be reduced when borrowing from modern datacenter technology. Therefore, PCIe and Multi-Gigabit Ethernet have become a foundation for automotive in-vehicle infrastructure. While the needs for storage in automotive are somewhat relaxed, compared to datacenters, automotive has a need for “unconventional” storage connectivity like many sensors to few CPUs to single SSD. And, unlike datacenters, automotive comes with strong constraints for size, weight and power, and real-time guaranties. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is an evolving set of IEEE standards for Ethernet based networks. It brings time synchronization (IEEE 802.1AS) along with low bounded latency via traffic scheduling (IEEE 802.1Qbv) and/or traffic shaping (IEEE 802.1Qav) and ultra-reliability via frame replication and elimination (IEEE 802.1CB), and thus, is one of the best positioned options for in-vehicle networking. In combination with reliable transports such as TCP/IP this enables deterministic networking for distributed systems. In our presentation we will describe the needs of modern automotive networking and storage architectures, and will share approaches for converging (real-time) Ethernet and PCIe as a common fabric for reliable and cost-efficient implementations. We showcase first performance results of a proof-of-concept implementation. We close with an outlook of the potential benefits of TSN and Deterministic Networking to other composable storage architectures.