When developing strategies for future research directions it may be a wise decision to reflect on the development in the respective area during the last few years. As to future applications of embedded systems, we consider a concise solution for interconnecting embedded systems to be one of their core requirements. In particular, we focus on the development of dependable communication.
Our paper recapitulates progress in research and development of dependable time-triggered communication protocols as done by the Institute for Computer Engineering at the Vienna University of Technology and by TTTech Computertechnik AG over the last five years. We provide an overview of the current situation and discuss the ongoing research and development directions.