A Novel Network Architecture for In-Vehicle Audio and Video Communication

In-vehicle audio/video communication has recently received considerable attention in the automotive industry. First, because of the increasing number of audio/video oriented nomadic devices in the consumer electronic market and the requirement to integrate them in the car. Second, because the number of real-time audio/video based driver assistance systems is growing fast. So far, the interconnection of in-vehicle stream oriented devices has been performed by different and proprietary, automotive oriented network systems with limited transmission capacities. Ethernet provides good conditions for audio/video streaming, due to its high transmission capacity. But it unfortunately fails in providing adequate QoS. In this work, a new network architecture for in-car audio/video communication based on the Ethernet technology is introduced and solutions are proposed to extend Ethernet with QoS guarantees while keeping its cost low.