A Deterministic Data Distribution Service Middleware for Integrating with Time-Sensitive Networking in In-Vehicle Networks

Driven by the rapid advancement of intelligence and connectivity, traditional distributed and signal-oriented automotive architectures are gradually being replaced by centralized, service-oriented architectures. In response to this transition, In-Vehicle Networks (IVNs) are expected to deliver high bandwidth, hard real-time performance, high reliability, and service-oriented capabilities. Data Distribution Service (DDS) and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) provide key technical support from the perspectives of service orientation and quality of service, respectively. Consequently, the integration of DDS and TSN has become a focal point in the field of IVNs. However, existing DDS message scheduling mechanisms cannot eliminate publishing time jitter, which prevents effective integration with deterministic scheduling mechanisms at the TSN layer, particularly the Time-Aware Shaper (TAS). To enable deterministic DDS communication in the DDS over TSN Architecture (DoTA), a Time-Triggered (TT) communication strategy based on message preemption and guard band mechanisms is proposed. This strategy is integrated into the flow controller of the DDS middleware. By scheduling a timed-event table, the publishing time of Time-Sensitive (TS) DDS messages is precisely controlled to align with the TAS mechanism. In addition, a schedulability analysis method is proposed to estimate the Worst-Case End-to-end Delay (WCED) of TS messages in DoTA. Experimental results from a physical testbed demonstrate that the proposed TT strategy can constrain the publishing time deviation of TS messages within 3 μs. When the TT strategy is jointly deployed with the TAS mechanism, both the end-to-end delay and jitter satisfy the requirements of safety-critical in-vehicle applications. Furthermore, the maximum deviation between the experimental results and the WCED estimated from the schedulability analysis is 15.4%. This indicates that the proposed method can effectively validate the feasibility of network designs and provide sufficient safety margins.