Integrating AUTOSAR End-to-End Communication Protection Library Inside Automotive Actuators

This paper explores new methods for increasing the safety level of the data transfer between electronic control units (ECUs) and actuators in automotive communication. It is proposed to introduce an end-to-end (E2E) module in automotive actuators to check the integrity of the data received through a standard automotive communication bus. The model contains hardware modules that implement the end-to-end communication checking (E2E Check) mechanism, as is defined by the Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR) standard. By integrating this module into automotive actuators, it is possible to connect them directly to the communication bus inside the vehicle, due to the possibility of verifying the integrity of the data received through the communication bus. The communication bus in this case could be (but not limited to) LIN (Local Interconnection Network), CAN (Controller Area Network) or FlexRay. This paper describes the hardware model, design, and mapping of the E2E communication checking module in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device. The proposed hardware model is fully configurable in terms of the structure of the received message from the communication bus, as is requested by the automotive E2E standard. The validation of the E2E communication checking module was done by using the data received from an E2E automotive sensor proposed by authors in previous works. Another validation method, presented in this paper, is to make a comparison of the status returned by the E2E communication checking module with the status provided by the AUTOSAR software E2E library, in context of several configurations of the received messages.