The industry needs higher bandwidth and faster communication networks to transmit safety-critical and time-sensitive data throughout their vehicles. In next-generation zone architectures, they are investigating Ethernet ring architectures for redundancy while adding more data types to the Ethernet backbone to reduce wiring harnesses, including audio.

Zone architectures leverage zone control modules (ZCMs) to transfer data from various sensors and electronic control units (ECUs) through an edge-node communication network. These ZCMs forward the combined sensor data to the central computing unit (CCU) through backbone communication, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 In-vehicle networking for a zone architecture

An Ethernet ring architecture builds on the existing high-bandwidth Ethernet backbone and provides redundancy by connecting each node in the ring to two others. Since the data can travel in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions, the CCU can still communicate with the ZCMs even if an Ethernet link breaks.

Increasing the vehicle network bandwidth enables the transmission of additional data such as audio, radar and camera data over the Ethernet backbone. While automakers are initially bringing primarily body functions into zones as they switch to zone architectures, an ideal zone architecture incorporates cross-domain applications. Audio is a prime target because of AVB standards, which provide deterministic latency for the audio data. Moving audio playback into the ZCM can eliminate the need for a separate communication bus, since it's possible to transmit audio data over Ethernet.