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TCN TimeAnalysis™ solution overview

TCN Time Analysis™ is a software tool developed to allow designers of networks and automotive electrical architectures to easily construct architecture and network digital twins and perform e.g. architecture exploration and what-if analysis via simulation.

The software behind TCN TimeAnalysis™ is continuously being evolved to support simulation of an ever wider range of bus- and network technologies, protocols, hardware traffic-shaping mechanisms etc. Currently, the focus is on standards and hardware mechanisms within Ethernet Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), the new set of standards being developed by IEEE for transporting audio and video as well as other time-sensitive data with increased robustness and determinism as compared to traditional switched Ethernet.

Summary of the benefits of TCN TimeAnalysis - download our product sheet.

The current version of TCN Time Analysis™ includes support for the following technologies:

Benefits of using TCN Time Analysis™ include:

  • Study how the network behaves under different load conditions, e.g. to find a suitable trade-off between network performance and hardware and software cost.
  • Evaluate different network topologies and network parameter configurations, e.g. port or flow priorities.
  • Identify possible hot-spots where contention will occur, e.g. due to high link utilization.
  • Estimate worst-case case delay and jitter for individual data frames, or even the occurrence of packet drop due to limited memory buffers sizes. Thereby the validity of any timing constraints applied to a time-sensitive data frame can be verified.
  • Minimize learning curves and debugging times of new protocols, traffic shaping mechanisms, etc.

Brief workflow description

Below, we briefly describe the workflow followed when working with TCN Time Analysis™.

Construct a network

TCN Time Analysis™ allows the user to construct a network topology from clean slate by instantiating a number of virtual Hosts representing automotive ECUs and Gateways. Next, the Hosts can be connected together by CAN- or LIN-busses or by defining Ethernet networks consisting of one or several Ethernet Switches. All virtual devices expose model parameters like link speeds, priorities etc. These parameters can be configured to explore the large design space available to system engineers.

Main application window

Define flows

Next, the Protocol Data Units (PDUs) originating within Hosts and carrying different signal and data messages are defined and how they map to different CAN- and Ethernet frames etc.

FRER flow

Simulate/analyze

During a simulation, statistical data is gathered and written to a database file. After the simulation terminates, the collected data and statistics can be analyzed. As the following example figures illustrate, valuable insights can be gained.

The frequency plot below specifically shows the end-to-end packet delay measured for a small control packet transmitted between two Hosts or ECUs. In this case, the control packet has to compete for bandwidth with Ethernet frames carrying fragmented and bandwidth-consuming video frames. Therefore, a newly arrived control packet is often delayed by an ongoing transmission of a larger Ethernet frame containing a fragment of a video frame, which is evident from the latency frequency plot above.

Latency chart

While a simulation is running, different hardware resources will be more or less preoccupied performing different tasks. A simple example is a Transmitter (Tx) of a Switch port that repeatedly transmits Ethernet frames being queued up while awaiting transmission. Every task commences and terminates at specific points in time. All the different tasks performed by hardware resources etc. during a simulation can be written to the results database and be inspected in the form of a Gantt-chart after the simulation terminates.

Gantt chart

These were just a couple of examples of results that can be inspected after running a simulaiton. For a full understanding of all the functionaltiy offered by TCN Time Analysis™, please request an evaluation license by contacting us at

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TCN TimeAnalysis™ offering

The TCN Time Analysis™ offering has its base in a model based simulation software and includes:

  • Software, developed by TCN : Software subscription, run within your site or as a service by TCN (or partner)
  • Consultancy service (optional): TCN, or partner, creates models to perform the analysis. TCN can develop software to the customer's specific needs, for instance reading customer specific files for import or to import data collected from a physical network measurement tool of your preference.