Lightweight Semantics-Preserving Communication for Real-Time Automotive Software

The automotive industry is confronting the multi-core challenge, where legacy and modern software must run correctly and efficiently in parallel, by designing their software around the Logical Execution Time (LET) model. While such designs offer implementations that are platform independent and time predictable, task communications are assumed to complete instantaneously. Thus, it is critical to implement timely data transfers between LET tasks, which may be on different cores, in order to preserve a design's data-flow. In this paper, we develop a lightweight Static Buffering Protocol (SBP) that satisfies the LET communication semantics and supports signal-based communication with multiple signal writers. Our simulation-based evaluation with realistic industrial automotive benchmarks shows that the execution overhead of SBP is at most half that of the traditional Point-To-Point (PTP) communication method. Moreover, SBP needs on average 60% less buffer memory than PTP.