Reimagining Automotive Service-Oriented Communication: A Case Study on Programmable Data Planes

Automotive electrical and electronic (E/E) engineering architectures are being radically overhauled to satisfy the needs of the current automotive trends ranging from electrification to connected vehicles and autonomous driving. Novel networking technologies are being explored for future-proofing in-vehicular networks and making them ready for applications emerging from these trends. Programmable data plane technologies based on reconfigurable match-action tables have been successfully used in data center networking for handling data center-specific applications. In this article, we seek to explore programmable data planes for their utility in in-vehicular networks. To this end, we briefly discuss programmable data plane technologies and present a case study on implementing a distributed feedback control loop using SOME/IP, an automotive service-oriented communication middleware. We outline the parts of the SOME/IP stack that can be moved from the end systems to the network devices for achieving a better workload split using these technologies, thus improving system utilization.