Remote Control of Peripheral Components in an Automotive in-vehicle Network

The automotive industry is shifting towards software-defined vehicles — A new paradigm in which software defines the core functions and features of a vehicle. This transition is accompanied by the move towards centralized electrical and electronic architectures (EEA), such as the zonal architecture. A key property of centralization is the consolidation of compute resources in the vehicle computer, which aims to simplify the system design while enabling advanced features such as over-the-air updates. Centralization simplifies the vehicle peripherals by moving software from dedicated sensor/actuator electronic control units (ECUs) to the vehicle computers and/ or zonal controllers. As a result, these ECUs could be replaced by simplified edge nodes that act as gateways between the application logic and the sensors/actuators. The edge nodes execute low-level commands, like SPI transactions, received from the vehicle computer/ zonal controller. A remote control protocol (RCP) interacts with these nodes over Ethernet. The protocol defines uniform methods for accessing and controlling the peripherals connected to the edge nodes. RCP is still under standardization and is not fully defined. Therefore, in this thesis, we explored remote control use cases within the zonal architecture to establish a framework for RCP, defining the system model and deriving the requirements for its communication protocol. Then, we evaluated two candidate transport protocols — IEEE1722 and SOME/IP — and how they would fit into the RCP framework. We learned that while IEEE1722 is more suitable as a transportmechanism for RCP because it is lightweight and more compatible with time-sensitive networking, it failed short of satisfying the service-oriented nature of some RCP requirements as interface discovery. Therefore, we defined a new concept that combines components from each protocol to realize a feature-complete remote control protocol.