AVB

Audio & video streams over Ethernet-based networks

Quick Explanation

  • Supports priority allocation
  • Supports bandwidth allocation
  • Supports routing table
  • Supports multicast
  • Supports Grand master

Protocol

  • IEEE 802.1BA-Audio Video Bridging (AVB) Systems
  • IEEE 802.1AS-Timing and Synchronization for Time-Sensitive Applications (gPTP)
  • IEEE 802.1Qat-Stream Reservation Protocol (SRP)
  • IEEE 802.1Qav-Forwarding and Queuing for Time-Sensitive Streams (FQTSS)

Introduction

Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB) is designed for low bandwidth control accesses, like register interfaces on system peripherals. This bus has an address and data phase similar to AHB, but a much reduced, low complexity signal list. The Advanced High performance Bus (AHB) is also a bus protocol introduced by ARM. It has larger bus widths compared to the previous releases. AHB is capable of waits, errors and bursts.

Audio Video Bridging

VisualSim Ethernet Audio Video Bridging Library enables designers to accurately design Ethernet Audio Video Bridging (AVB) networks and products working with AVB to meet Quality-of-Service, reliability and power requirements. The use of this library in conjunction with other VisualSim Libraries accelerates the design and testing of AVB-connected products and networks. The AVB library can be used in the design of automotive application, network ICs, professional video equipment and network for concert halls and studios.

This Ethernet AVB library is fully integrated with the VisualSim automotive network library and the VisualSim hardware architecture library to model, simulate and design complete systems. In addition to the Ethernet and AVB network, the system can contain other networks such as CAN and FlexRay, sensors, ECU, hardware accelerators, display units, video processors, and audio equipment.

Standards supported:

  • IEEE 802.BA (baseline spec)
  • IEEE 802.Qat (admission, SRP, base IEEE 802.1Q amendments)
  • IEEE 802.1AS (subset of IEEE 1588)
    • clock sync
  • Model Supported
    • Routing Table
    • Table with external file setup
    • Traffic Generator Block
    • Traffic class downgrades
      • Bandwidth
      • Class A to Class B
      • Bridge mismatch of Class
  • Bandwidth reservation percent parameter

Coming soon

  • IEEE 802.1BA (identification)
    • 100 Mbps check
  • IEEE 802.Qav (forwarding and queuing time sensitive streams, base IEEE 802.1Q amendments)
    • Idle Slope, Send Slope
  • IEEE 802.1aq
    • VLAN

Features

This new Ethernet AVB library enables system designers to quickly construct models of hardware system that operate on AVB over Ethernet and network using AVB protocol. The engineers can use the library components to create traffic stimulus to emulate sensors, and network traffic patterns. Pre-built parameters values can be modified by the users to experiment with different traffic inputs, traffic shaping algorithms, reservation quantities and hardware attributes to evaluate the impact on latency and throughput. The Ethernet AVB library consists of AVB traffic generators, talkers, listeners, stream reservation protocol, registration, traffic shaping and clock synchronization. The pre-built statistics includes latency plots for each stream, histograms of the latency distribution, statistics of the throughput and an extensive tracing of registration, reservation, data transfer, de-registration, and error reporting. A major invention of this library is that networks can be constructed by simply configuring spreadsheets and tables.

Key Blocks in the Library:

  • This block is the Ethernet MAC layer implementation for a bridge
  • StreamRP: This block handles the stream reservation protocol
  • AVB_Node: This block is the MAC layer implementation of node
  • AVB_Stats: This block provides the statistics for all the streams terminating at this node
  • AVB_Network_Setup: This block is required when the AVB blocks are used
  • AVB_Config_Table: This block contains examples of the required tables, setup blocks and the memory blocks for the AVB modelling environment
  • AVB_Traffic: This is a Ethernet traffic generator block

AVB - generates traffic based on routing, bandwidth, class type and stream