Enhancing communication on automotive networks using data layer extensions

Automotive systems function within a distributed computing paradigm consisting of networks of sensors, actuators and processing units. More advanced functions are finding their way into the automotive domain, making computing and networking more complex. While safety, security and determinism are primary concerns for many systems, the networking protocols do not provide extensions to address them and it is left to application designers to tackle these issues. Standardising simple features like time-stamping of messages and health status flags can help improve robustness and mitigate risks associated with replay attacks. It is also possible to integrate further protection, like encryption of messages, addressing the increasing security concerns in this domain. In this paper, we demonstrate a systematic way of accommodating such enhancements within a standard automotive network that retains interoperability with existing systems. We show how such enhancements can be made possible in both software and hardware to help add functionality above the core network specification. We also show that the enhancements incorporated at the hardware layer offers 20× better performance than the software-based approach. © 2013 IEEE.