Practical limitations of in-vehicle Ethernet for autonomous mobile machine control

Abstract

This research evaluates the feasibility of using standard Ethernet infrastructure for high-speed autonomous vehicle control applications, with particular attention to weight-constrained platforms such as wing-in-ground effect vehicles. We compared four messaging protocols - ROS2/Fast-DDS, MQTT, gRPC, and Python Banyan - under both empty and loaded network conditions using a laboratory setup simulating a distributed autonomous system with competing high-bandwidth sensor data and control messages. Analysis of 600,000 packets revealed that most protocols maintained round-trip times below 1ms on average. Surprisingly, network congestion resulted in insignificant performance degradation. The relationship between packet size and performance was evident but not prohibitive. Our findings suggest that control systems for autonomous machines can effectively operate at frequencies up to 500 Hz in 1 Gbit/s Ethernet networks when designed to handle occasional delayed packets. For weight-sensitive autonomous applications, these results offer promising evidence that lightweight, entry-level Ethernet equipment can provide reliable communication without specialized networking hardware, resulting in significant cost and weight savings.