  As we power through to the future, in-vehicle communications reliance on
speed is becoming a challenging predicament. This is mainly due to the
ever-increasing number of electronic control units (ECUs), which will continue
to drain network capacity, hence further increasing bandwidth demand. For a
wired network, a tradeoff between bandwidth requirement, reliability, and
cost-effectiveness has been our main motivation in developing a high-speed
network architecture that is based on the integration of two time-triggered
protocols namely; Time Triggered Ethernet (TT-E) and Time Triggered Controller
Area Network (TT-CAN). Therefore, as a visible example of an Internet of
Vehicles technology, we present a time triggered communication-based network
architecture. The new architecture can provide scalable integration of advanced
functionalities, while maintaining safety and high reliability. To comply with
the bandwidth requirement, we consider high-speed TT-Ethernet as the main bus
(i.e., backbone network) where sub-networks can use more cost-effective and
lower bandwidth TT-CAN to communicate with other entities in the network via a
gateway. The main challenge in the proposed network architecture has been to
resolve interoperability between two entirely different time-triggered
protocols, especially in terms of timing and synchronization. In this paper, we
first explore the main key drivers of the proposed architecture, which are
bandwidth, reliability, and timeliness. We then demonstrate the effectiveness
of our gateway design in providing full interoperability between the two
time-triggered protocols.
