Multi-core architecture for AUTOSAR based on virtual Electronic Control Units

Message-based Networks-on-a-Chip (NoC) provide significant advantages with respect to temporal predictability, fault isolation and energy efficiency. However, the AUTOSAR standard for multi-core operating systems focuses only on multi-core platforms with shared memories. In order to obtain the benefits of message-based interactions, this paper maps an AUTOSAR system to a multi-core platform with a time-triggered NoC. Cores serve as virtual Electronic Control Units (ECUs), each containing a lightweight AUTOSAR operating system and a Run-Time Environment (RTE). Virtual ECUs provide meaningful units of abstraction and ensure freedom of inference from other cores. Computationally expensive functionality of the basic software is delegated to system cores, which serve as hardware accelerators for the application cores.