As Manager Products at Star Electronics GmbH & Co. KG, Steffen Gugenhan is responsible for driving product solutions for the automotive market. He joined Star Electronics in September 2015 and brings more than two decades of experience in automotive electronics, product management, project leadership and embedded-system development.
Before joining Star Electronics, he spent more than seven years at Eberspächer Electronics GmbH in Göppingen. He progressed from Development Engineer to Project Manager and Product Manager, before becoming Head of Product Management & Development for Hardware and Embedded Software. Earlier in his career, he worked as a Development Engineer at TZM Transferzentrum Mikroelektronik in Göppingen from 2005 to 2008.
Presentation
Automotive Ethernet Traffic Capture and Time Correlation in Software-Defined Vehicles
As Automotive Ethernet becomes the communication backbone of modern Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs), requirements for network monitoring, recording and analysis are increasing significantly. Beyond traditional diagnostic and development activities, performance analysis, TSN validation, cybersecurity testing, OTA-update investigations and distributed software debugging require reliable access to network communication throughout the vehicle lifecycle.
Traffic can be captured using passive network TAPs, switch-port mirroring, media converters, transparent gateways, embedded monitoring or software-based endpoint capture. Each method offers different advantages and limitations in network transparency, timestamp accuracy, latency impact, scalability, implementation effort and the ability to manipulate traffic.
This presentation provides a practical comparison of these architectures and their suitability for common automotive use cases. Capturing packets may be straightforward, but ensuring data is captured completely, accurately and with correct timing information is significantly more challenging.
A dedicated section addresses preventing data loss during recording. High-bandwidth Gigabit Ethernet networks can exceed the capabilities of storage devices, memory buffers, mirror ports and processing units. Buffering mechanisms, trigger-based recording, circular buffers, continuous logging and capture-interface performance are examined, together with trade-offs between recording duration, capture rate and system cost.
The presentation also examines measurement-system behaviour during vehicle sleep and wake-up transitions. ECU-startup analysis, wake-up validation and cybersecurity monitoring often depend on information exchanged immediately after network activation. Always-on capture, autonomous edge recording, synchronised startup and trigger-based approaches are compared.
Accurate time correlation across multiple measurement points is essential for deterministic vehicle networks. Local hardware timestamping, centralised time servers, GPS-synchronised systems, IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP), Automotive Ethernet timing profiles and TSN synchronisation are evaluated for accuracy, complexity, scalability and suitability.
Attendees will gain a technology-neutral framework for balancing measurement accuracy, network transparency, flexibility, synchronisation quality, implementation effort and cost when designing Automotive Ethernet monitoring and recording solutions.
30-minute agenda
1. Introduction and motivation: Automotive Ethernet in SDVs, capture challenges and common measurement pitfalls.
2. Capture methods: passive TAPs, SPAN, media converters, transparent gateways, and embedded or endpoint capture.
3. Time synchronisation: hardware and software timestamps, IEEE 1588 PTP, Automotive and TSN profiles, and multi-device correlation.
4. Preventing data loss: bottlenecks, storage and RAM, triggered recording, circular buffering and high-bandwidth strategies.
5. Sleep and wake-up: startup communication, always-on monitoring, autonomous recording and trigger strategies.
6. Decision matrix: use-case fit and practical trade-offs between accuracy, visibility, latency and flexibility.
