Dynamic Service-Orientation for Software-Defined In-Vehicle Networks

Modern In-Vehicle Networks (IVNs) are composed of a large number of devices and services linked via an Ethernet-based time-sensitive network. Communication in future IVNs will become more dynamic as services can be updated, added, or removed during runtime. This requires a flexible and adaptable IVN, for which Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a promising candidate. In this paper, we show how SDN can be used to support a dynamic, service-oriented network architecture. We demonstrate our concept using the SOME/IP protocol, which is the most widely deployed implementation of automotive service-oriented architectures. In a simulation study, we evaluate the performance of SOME/IP-adaptive SDN control compared to standard Ethernet switching and non-optimized SDN. Our results show an expected overhead introduced by the central SDN controller, which is, however, reduced by up to 50% compared to SOME/IP-unaware SDN. For a large number of services, the setup time is in the order of milliseconds, which matches standard Ethernet switching. A SOME/IP-aware SDN controller can optimize the service discovery to improve adaptability, robustness, security, and Quality-of-Service of the IVN while remaining transparent to existing SOME/IP implementations.