Hardware Acceleration of Data Distribution Service (DDS) for Automotive Communication and Computing

Abstract

The increasing growth in complexity of vehicles' functionalities is driving a technological shift in the design of software architectures in the automotive industry. Traditional signal-oriented networking is being replaced by service-oriented communications enabled by a new generation of Electronic Control Units (ECUs). The growing interest for full-fledged middlewares can be supported by these powerful ECUs. However, the new capabilities come at a non-negligible cost, which conflicts with the need to design a cost-effective solution that allows for meeting aggressive budget goals in a high volume market like automotive. In this paper, we illustrate how a significant part of the functionalities of a powerful middleware like Data Distribution Service (DDS) can be effectively implemented through hardware accelerators. We show that our approach can guarantee high performance while minimizing system complexity at the software level (e.g. AUTOSAR) by shifting painful or inefficient software implementations of QoS policies directly to hardware. This, in turn, allows to build cost-effective solutions suitable for next-generation automotive systems.