With the developing technologies and methods in the field of real-time communication and the constantly increasing amount of data to be transmitted, the railway industry has jumped on the bandwagon of modernizing its processes.

In the field of railway applications, various manufacturers still provide different and mostly incompatible solutions.  These solutions are specified for a certain constellation of a train, but in most cases they are not able to offer the correct functionality if the constellation of the train changes.  In order to separate safety and time-critical areas from non-critical areas that e.g. offer services for passengers such as wireless LAN, separate networks with their own infrastructure must also be set up. That means more weight and costs for the train and its manufacturers.

In the area of real-time communications, time-sensitive networking (TSN) has proven to be a possible solution to overcome the problems mentioned above.  It provides methods and mechanisms for Ethernet technology that enrich it with aspects of determinism and reliability.

With Time-Sensitive Networks (TSN), the safety and time critical domains can be merged with non-critical areas, so that the safety and time critical domains can still be guaranteed sufficient reliability and determinism and the needs of passengers are satisfied.

The aim of this research project is to test the suitability of TSN in the railway sector.  The primary goal of the project is to analyse whether the requirements of safety and time-critical applications can be met with respect to deterministic network communication and bounded latencies and at the same time to prove that the fulfilment of the requirements of critical applications does not lead to a significant impairment of non-critical applications.

This research project deals with the application of quality of service guarantees in Time-Sensitive Networking, in particular using Network Calculus. Real-time systems are increasingly required in industry, e.g. the automotive, automation or entertainment industries. Classical Ethernet, however, does not guarantee real-time performance, which leads the Time-Sensitive Networking Task Group (IEEE 802.1) to develop standards for real-time data transmission over Ethernet networks. These standards are summarized under the term Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). Within the scope of this research project, the application of Network Calculus for TSN is now being investigated. Network Calculus (NC) is a system theory for deterministic performance evaluation. It uses mathematical methods to provide performance guarantees for communication systems. NC can help evaluate TSN's real-time properties, meet required latency limits, and provide insight into the optimal configuration of networks. It also enables buffer sizing and can evaluate existing or new scheduling algorithms.

Satellite communication is a way to provide broadband internet access all over the world. However, with geostationary satellites the propagation delay leads to very high delays in the magnitude of several hundred milliseconds. In order to improve the interactivity and responsiveness of communication systems, utilizing a second communication link can be highly beneficial.

The Transparent Multichannel IPv6 (TMC-IPv6) Project aims to combine the advantages of multiple heterogeneous communication links. An illustrative example is the combination of a rural DSL connection with low data rate/low latency and a satellite connection with high data rate but high latency, which results in a user’s internet access with high data rate and low latency providing a better Quality of Experience (QoE).

Satellite-based internet access from different operators is provided by our project partners in order to experience realistic satellite communication environment and test potential solutions. The outdoor unit (parabolic antenna) is mounted on the roof of the Wolfgang-Händler-Hochhaus.

The electrical energy network is in a state of change due to the digitization and integration of decentralized energy sources. Pervasive and interconnected sensors and actuators are creating complex virtual control systems.
Based on an efficient communication network, innovative services and applications can provide an ecological, economical, stable and high-quality energy supply. A particular challenge are the diverse requirements and traffic patterns of applications that may be distributed over large areas and time critical.
The object of this research project is the replacement of proprietary solutions by a programmable communication network with standard components. These enable economical operation and high compatibility, individual requirements are fulfilled by software. The overarching goal is to make optimal use of the infrastructure of the energy and communication networks and to minimize over-provisioning.

As a result of the integration of increasingly elaborate and distributed functionality in modern automobiles the amount of installed electronic and software continuously grows. The associated growth in system complexity makes it inevitable that the test methods used for verification and validation keep pace with this development. Nowadays the test routine in industry usually requires each test case to be crafted manually by a test designer. The test case execution itself and test result evaluation usually are performed in an automated manner. This procedure has many drawbacks, as the crafting of single test cases is apparently awkward and error-prone and it is impractical to calculate test management criteria such as test coverage. Within this project a method is developed that overcomes these drawbacks. Markov chain usage models (MCUM) constitute the central role within this project. MCUMs are employed to describe the possible usage of the System-under-test and to derive test cases from them. On the one hand the integration of MCUMs makes it possible to develop methods to integrate test requirements formally, as to improve traceability. On the other hand they provide the basis to incorporate algorithms or strategies that allow the generation of test cases fitting to various test requirements in the automotive domain. These comprise e.g. different coverage criteria under usage or system oriented aspects. Moreover established methods exist that allow the calculation of dependability measures based on results obtained from test cases automatically generated from MCUMs. Also the test planning can be supported by indicators that are derived during the test process. The project aims for developing a method to describe test requirements formally by building a model. This model allows the derivation of test suites considering various testing aims and constraints. The tools themselves should form a part of the ITF (Integrated Testing Framework) and the process extend the current one described by EXAM and employed within the Volkswagen AG.

Network calculus (NC) is a system theory for deterministic performanceevaluation. It uses mathematical methods to provide performanceguarantees for communication systems. It can be applied in thedesign phase of future systems as well as the analysis of existingsystems. In real-time systems, the timeliness of events plays animportant role. Therefore, the classical performance evaluation based onstochastic methods that result in (stochastic) expectation values, i.e.mean values, has to be extended by mathematical tools producingguaranteed bounds for worst case scenarios. Network calculus allows toobtain upper bounds for end-to-end delays for one nodes or aseries of nodes within a network, upper bounds for the required bufferspace and bounds for the output flow.These analytic performance bounds characterize the worst-case behaviorof traffic flows and allow dimensioning the corresponding systems.

Currently, we study the applicability of NC for multiplexed flows, inparticular when the FIFO property cannot be assumed at the merging ofindividual flows. The aggregation of data flows plays an important rolein modelling the multiplexing scheme. We apply NC for performanceevaluation both of aggregate multiplexing at one node and atconcatenation of aggregated multiple nodes in different scenarios.
We have successfully introduced network calculus methods in thefield of internal automotive communication systems in industrialapplications. Embedded in-car networks need to fulfill hardreal-time constraints. While TDMA-based access schemes in FlexRayguarantee that certain bound can be met, statistical multiplexingin CAN networks only allows to calculate bounds for the highestpriority messages. By applying network calculus, we obtained boundsfor all priority classes without the need to specify a concretescheduling of the messages. Upper bounds for the amount of datathat arrives at each network node are enough to determine hardbounds for the end-to-end delay in CAN networks.

Another field of application is industrial communication.Factory automation often also requires hard real-time boundsfor the end-to-end delay of messages. The use of Ethernet withpriority tagging allows cost-efficient implementation offactory automation systems. But without stringent planningof the network, the required bounds on the end-to-end delaycannot be guaranteed. Network calculus allows to obtain therequired bounds when applied in the planning phase of thenetwork. It also allows to dimension the buffers of nodes,e.g. of industrial Ethernet switches. Nowadays, some ofthe users of industrial Ethernet need to integratenon-real-time products like web cams and remote operationterminals into existing networks. Withoutadditional analysis, the additional traffic caused by devicesthat do not require hard real-time constraints willcause a violation of the bounds for the delay and bufferspace for real-time traffic. By taking into account thisnon-real-time traffic in network calculus and by applyingtraffic shaping for the non-real-time flows allows todimension the network so that all bounds are met.Network calculus is currently integrated into an existingautomated industrial network planning tool.