Design of a Communication Framework for Heterogeneous Multicore Systems in CAN Communication

With the advancement of system-on-chip (SOC) technology, automotive electronic control units (ECUs) have shifted from the distributed heterogeneous multiprocessor architecture to the centralized heterogeneous multicore processor architecture. This transformation provides a high-speed inter-core data exchange mechanism based on shared memory. In the distributed architectures, automotive communication software predominantly leverages the CAN bus for inter-core communication, which fundamentally differs from shared memory-based communication methods. This difference can cause significant porting difficulties when porting existing communication software to new hardware architectures. Balancing communication performance and porting efficiency has become a new challenge. To this end, we introduce a communication framework for CAN bus in heterogeneous multicore systems, namely—VirtCAN, which is optimized based on the mainstream heterogeneous multicore communication framework RPMsg. RPMsg is a lightweight inter-core communication framework for heterogeneous multicore systems based on shared memory. VirtCAN emulates the functions of actual CAN controllers by optimizing and encapsulating RPMsg. This approach preserves the original CAN communication method while enabling faster inter-core data exchange through shared memory, thereby achieving a balance between software porting efficiency and communication performance. Experiments were conducted on heterogeneous multicore processors based on ARM architecture, validating VirtCAN's significant communication advantages over the CAN bus and the original RPMsg.