Mixed-criticality networks for adaptive systems

A crucial aspect of mission-critical vehicles is their reaction to environmental or system-internal changes. Ideally, the new situation is autonomously assessed and the vehicle´s behavior is adapted accordingly. Modern mission-critical vehicles realize a network-centric design approach, for one reason because it follows the inherent requirements of interconnecting the sensors and actuators of a control system and secondly, to tolerate a partial failure of the system. Therefore, in order to construct a truly adaptive system, the underlying network infrastructure must harmonically interplay with the top-level adaptive decisions. TTEthernet is such a COTS network infrastructure supporting network-centric system design that provides built-in integrity and redundancy management mechanisms as well as sharing the same physical network for applications of mixed criticality. This paper discusses adaptable QoS and adaptable protocol-control flow in general and in particular using TTEthernet as case study.