Designing multicore ECU architecture in vehicle networks using AUTOSAR

The number of electronic control units (ECUs) in modern vehicles has continuously increased in last few decades. In addition, advanced functionalities antilock braking systems, adaptive cruise control and climate control put higher computational demand on ECUs, which further increases the design complexity of automotive control systems. Multicore processors having multiple processing units are integrated on a single chip, have emerged to be the main computing controllers not only for high-end servers but also for embedded control systems. Using multicore processors, more centralized architecture designs can be adopted for automotive control systems. The recent initiative on AUTOmotive Open System ARchitecture (AUTOSAR) has established several standards for automotive software and hardware designs, which include guidelines for designing centralized architecture with multicore ECUs for automotive control systems. With AUTOSAR, it is expected that computational control tasks of different functions can share one ECU or run on any ECU connected with in-vehicle network like CAN and FlexRay. Also, In this paper, we describe some key analytical components that together characterize the hierarchical bus structures composed of FlexRay, CANbus and LINbus. Our analysis shows that the practical constraints imposed by standards such as AUTOSAR can lead to higher levels of schedulable resource utilization. This reduces both the overall component count and cost, while facilitating easy enhancements.