Testing switched Ethernet networks in automotive embedded systems

Ethernet is currently being discussed within the automotive community to become a general network technology for interconnecting future distributed automotive systems. If this is the case, a complete tool chain will be necessary to support developers to implement their functions. One important component is the availability of tools to monitor, generate, manipulate, and simulate traffic in distributed embedded systems. Today´s established communication technologies like LIN, CAN, or FlexRay have the enormous advantage to be based on a physical shared medium which makes it relatively easy to add an additional test device to a network under test. This paper describes an approach to implement such a test device for switched Ethernet networks, presents performance measurements of our implemented Ethernet-Test-Switch, and introduces a concept to integrate simulated and existing devices with each other.