A Novel Configurable End-to-End Communication Protection Hardware Module for Automotive Sensors

This article presents a hardware model of a configurable end-to-end (E2E) communication protection module for automotive sensors which can be integrated in automotive networks composed of electronic control units (ECUs) that run Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR) software applications. By having such an E2E module inside, the automotive sensors will be able to protect the output data by a cyclic redundancy code (CRC), so that the data are compliant with communication software modules in AUTOSAR applications. This novel hardware model was developed based on the simplified E2E module for the automotive sensors proposed by the authors in their previous works. The protected data can be transferred by the sensor onto the automotive communication bus (e.g., CAN, LIN, FlexRay, and so on) to be utilized by the electronic control units (ECUs) or other systems (e.g., actuators) connected to this bus inside of the road vehicle. The novelty of this work is that the configurable module allows to map (according to the communication matrix of the vehicle) the sensor’s output signals inside the communication frame (message). This mapping can be done regardless of the number and size of the signals, if the total length of all signals does not exceed the size of the output message. The design of the configurable E2E communication protection module has been done using Xilinx Vivado tool, while for the validation of the hardware integration, a Xilinx Spartan 7 field programmable gate array (FPGA) electronic device has been used.