WebAssembly: Paving the Way Towards a Unified and Distributed Intra-Vehicle Computing- and Data-Acquisition-Platform?

Along with rapidly increasing connectedness in the automotive context and mobility in general, data-driven services consequently gain in complexity and degree of integration into the life of the user. Prescribed by the fast-paced world of consumer electronics, end-user expectations have been shaped in regard to time-to-market, update frequency and availability. High flexibility and, specifically in the automotive context, strict fault tolerance are demanded by the underlying both on- and offboard data infrastructure in order to be able to quickly react to rapidly changing demands and requirements during the lifetime of automobiles. Recent trends indicate a shift towards flexible and isolated, thus fault tolerant, software components that can be transparently deployed over the air. Latest developments have further led to portable, efficient and sandboxed representations of executables like WebAssembly. Contrary to cloud-first strategies, streaming all relevant data to the cloud and analyzing it offboard is, due to oft-needed high sample frequency and thus vastly increased data traffic, not always feasible. We therefore explore and discuss the potential of an efficient, scalable and unified distributed onboard computing- and data-acquisition-platform based on WebAssembly across a wide variety of vehicular electronic control units.