VESBA: a middleware oriented architecture for virtualized embedded systems

Abstract

Designing robust and safe systems is hard. Extending and maintaining such a system is even harder. The increasing demand to integrate consumer electronics and custom applications based on a broad range of platforms into vehicles is intensifying this problem. In the following paper we present an architecture which allows designing a safe and robust system core that can share its resources in a safe way with other applications. The main focus is to make the car processing and information resources available to 3rd party applications without compromising the safety and robustness of any critical system in the vehicle. Recent advances in virtualization technology allow us to propose a virtualized embedded system architecture incorporating middleware and distributed finite state machine technology. The 4-layer architecture allows for the emulation of an almost arbitrary consumer electronics platform on standard car hardware architectures which encapsulates all safety critical system resources. The middleware handles the event routing and transformation and provides services like encryption, routing and transformation. We also show how distributed finite state machines can handle the resource access policies in and between the several virtualization layers in a flexible yet safe way.