Reconfigurable Communication Middleware for Flex Ray-Based Distributed Embedded Systems

In this paper we consider the case of a network of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) connected through a Flex Ray bus in the automotive domain. Multiple distributed applications can run on this underlying architecture, each partitioned into tasks that are mapped on different ECUs. These applications can often be executed in different functional modes with different requirements on the communication resources in terms of data size and sampling period. Moreover, new applications can be deployed on to the ECUs at run-time. To efficiently utilize the communication resources and accommodate new applications, a certain flexibility in reallocation of the resource is necessary. However, the Flex Ray bus requires static configuration of schedules and data mapping in order to guarantee a more deterministic system behavior, allowing little room for flexibility. In order to address this problem, we propose a reconfigurable communication middleware that lies between the application layer and the communication controller layer, which maps messages onto Flex Ray schedules, and can be reconfigured at runtime. The configuration is synthesized and deployed online, allowing a certain reallocation of communication resources to applications. In this paper, we describe the design of such a reconfigurable communication middleware and demonstrate its function with an implementation using industry-strength Flex Ray design tools.