Smart Network Interfaces for Advanced Automotive Applications

The computing integrated in modern vehicles has increased dramatically over the last decade, with many cars having over 50 compute units controlling critical and non-critical functions. These ECUs communicate over increasingly complex and heterogeneous networks, and these systems combined present challenges in terms of scalability, validation, and security. In this article, we present the concept of smart network interfaces that incorporate programmable computation in the datapath to enable more features at the network layer, thereby offloading auxiliary tasks from the ECU processor. System-level capabilities such as hardware-level fault tolerance, application consolidation with sufficient isolation, and system-level security at each compute node become possible without disturbing the core computational functions of the ECUs. We demonstrate this approach with practical prototyping in FPGAs.