Design of a FlexRay/Ethernet Gateway and Security Mechanism for In-Vehicle Networks

Due to the development of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), the Ethernet has become one of the most important communication protocols for the future of automotive networks. This is because the existing communication protocols (such as FlexRay) do not provide sufficiently high bandwidth requirements. The main challenge for the automotive industry will be to transfer and extend standard IP and Ethernet into vehicles and still fulfill the automotive requirements. The automotive gateway not only links two or more protocols and exchanges the data using each, but also monitors and ensures functional safety. This paper proposes a FlexRay/Ethernet gateway by considering the development conditions of embedded systems and the security in the field of vehicle networking. The proposed method is implemented on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) system to evaluate running time and to analyze the overhead of the security mechanism. For one-to-one mapping logic, the execution times of FlexRay to the Ethernet path and Ethernet to FlexRay path are constant, at 4.67 μs and 6.71 μs, respectively. In particular, cybersecurity can be integrated as an extension of the gateway with low latency and power consumption.