Load Balancing towards ECU Integration

Abstract

There has been an exponential increase in the number of electronic components embedded in vehicles. Development processes, techniques and tools have changed to accommodate that evaluation. A wide range of electronic functions such as navigation, adaptive control, infotainment, traffic information, safety system etc are implemented in today's vehicles. Many of the new functions are not stand alone and hence they need to exchange information, sometimes with stringent time constraints for time critical functions such as engine management, collision warning systems etc. The complexity of the embedded architecture in a vehicle is continually increasing. Today up to 2500 signals are exchanged through up to 70 Electronic Control Units (ECUs) using 5 different buses. This paper introduces the load balancing approach across ECUs supplied by various Tier1 suppliers.

Software and Hardware Design Challenges in Automotive Embedded System

“…Since the data movement between ECUs incurs communication cost, the schedule should give balanced load with minimal data movement. Restricting the data movement to the neighboring ECUs might reduce communication cost [23]. Load balancer attempts to ensure that loads are balanced across a group of ECUs.…”