Unreliable Data Transmissions und Limited Hardware Communication Buffers in Automotive E/E Virtual Prototypes

The immense complexity of modern automotive E/E architectures requires a thorough system evaluation already in early design phases. This can be achieved by high-level virtual prototypes. They rely on abstractions and assessments to be applicable in early phases, simplify their development, and speedup the evaluation. One of the typically neglected discrepancies between the virtual prototype and the real system is the handling of hardware communication buffers, particularly in upcoming communication networks like Ethernet-based switched networks. This paper presents a simulation-based prototyping approach that is capable of investigating the interaction of system functionality and hardware components including their hardware buffers. This allows to estimate and, thus, dimension the required amount of communication buffers in the hardware components. Moreover, the methodology investigates the effects of hardware buffer overflows, resulting in unreliable data transmissions due to packet loss, on the system functionality for the sake of functional validation. A case-study from the automotive infotainment domain highlights the benefit that results from applying the proposed hardware buffer analysis on both buffer dimensioning and functional validation.