Container-Based Electronic Control Unit Virtualisation: A Paradigm Shift Towards a Centralised Automotive E/E Architecture

The past 40 years have seen automotive Electronic Control Units (ECUs) move from being purely mechanical controlled to being primarily digital controlled. While the safety of passengers and efficiency of vehicles has seen significant improvements, rising ECU numbers have resulted in increased vehicle weight, greater demands placed on power, more complex hardware and software, ad hoc methods for updating software, and subsequent increases in costs for both vehicle manufacturers and consumers. To address these issues, the research presented in this paper proposes that virtualisation technologies be applied within automotive electrical/electronic (E/E) architecture. The proposed approach is evaluated by comprehensively studying the CPU and memory resource requirements to support container-based ECU automotive functions. This comprehensive performance evaluation reveals that lightweight container virtualisation has the potential to welcome a paradigm shift in E/E architecture, promoting consolidation and enhancing the architecture by facilitating power, weight, and cost savings. Container-based virtualisation will also enable efficient and robust online dynamic software updates throughout a vehicle’s lifetime.