VEGa: A high performance vehicular ethernet gateway on hybrid FPGA

Shanker Shreejith, Philipp Mundhenk, Andreas Ettner, Suhaib A. Fahmy, Sebastian Steinhorst, Martin Lukasiewycz, Samarjit Chakraborty

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

32 Scopus citations

Abstract

Modern vehicles employ a large amount of distributed computation and require the underlying communication scheme to provide high bandwidth and low latency. Existing communication protocols like Controller Area Network (CAN) and FlexRay do not provide the required bandwidth, paving the way for adoption of Ethernet as the next generation network backbone for in-vehicle systems. Ethernet would co-exist with safety-critical communication on legacy networks, providing a scalable platform for evolving vehicular systems. This requires a high-performance network gateway that can simultaneously handle high bandwidth, low latency, and isolation; features that are not achievable with traditional processor based gateway implementations. We present VEGa, a configurable vehicular Ethernet gateway architecture utilising a hybrid FPGA to closely couple software control on a processor with dedicated switching circuit on the reconfigurable fabric. The fabric implements isolated interface ports and an accelerated routing mechanism, which can be controlled and monitored from software. Further, reconfigurability enables the switching behaviour to be altered at run-time under software control, while the configurable architecture allows easy adaptation to different vehicular architectures using high-level parameter settings. We demonstrate the architecture on the Xilinx Zynq platform and evaluate the bandwidth, latency, and isolation using extensive tests in hardware.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1790-1803
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Computers
Volume66
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 1 2017
Externally publishedYes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Software

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