A parallel re-programming method for in-vehicle gateway to save software update time

In this paper, we propose a parallel re-programming method that can reduce the time to complete software updates of in-vehicle electronic control units. The proposed method has been designed to operate in an in-vehicle gateway that integrates different types of in-vehicle networks including controller area network, FlexRay, and Ethernet to provide seamless communication between heterogeneous networks. The re-programming method provides parallel processing for flash update data that has been received in order to enable a simultaneous software update of multiple electronic control units. We implemented the proposed method in an in-vehicle gateway on an embedded system and designed an experimental environment to evaluate its performance. We also measured and analyzed the performance of the parallel re-programming gateway by conducting an experiment based on the experimental environment.