Service Oriented Architecture based connectivity of automotive ECUs

Abstract

Modern automotive industry uses embedded systems and corresponding Electronic Control Units (ECU) for a wide variety of purposes from entertainment to vehicle control. The use of these embedded systems became crucial to an extent that the performance of these embedded systems can severely affect the performance of the automobile. So the industry tries to develop new and efficient systems periodically, to improve the performance of the whole system. As the number of ECUs in an automobile increased, new technologies were developed to interconnect these ECUs. As a result of much efficient ECUs, the data produced by these ECUs and the data to be transmitted between these ECUs increased to a very large scale. The industry tried to select new connectivity solutions which provide higher bandwidth. The automotive embedded system industry thus ended up in using the well accepted and highly standardized Ethernet connectivity. This paved the way to develop new technologies for automotive embedded system. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has proved to be an efficient and flexible software design paradigm for high level systems. The main factors behind its success were the amount of scalability and reusability provided by this platform. The usage of SOA over the automotive Ethernet can provide the benefit of SOA to the automotive embedded world. Such an approach needs a deep feasibility study to identify whether such integration is possible, and to discover architectures and protocols which support it.