Evaluation Framework for MOST Based Driver Assistance Systems Based on Virtual Prototypes

January 23, 2014 // By Oliver Bringmann, Jyoti Joshi, Sebastian Reiter, Wolfgang Rosenstiel, Alexander Viehl
An efficient communication network is the backbone of distributed Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Analyzing such systems in different scenarios under different system parameters is a complex task. Evaluating crucial system parameters in an early design phase for the optimum system behavior is important. An evaluation framework based on a virtual prototype is presented in this article for assessing MOST based ADAS systems.

The number of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) in a vehicle is continually increasing. These systems process the information from multiple sensors such as radar sensors, cameras or the Global Positioning System (GPS) for driver assistance. Because these sensors are distributed all over the vehicle, an efficient data communication network is needed to share the information between the different ADAS. Additionally, these systems often demand commonly used, complex processing algorithms like Fast Fourier Transformation or a Hough-Transformation. It could be beneficial to have dedicated pre-processing nodes for this common task, maybe with optimized hardware architectures. This increases the requirements for the distributed ADAS network. By providing an optimized communication network, the amount of wiring can be reduced. The MOST communication network offers many features that are required for such a task.

The MOST network technology offers a variety of configuration alternatives. They have to be assessed to find the optimal solution, preferably in an early design phase. To support the assessment, this article proposes an evaluation framework based on virtual prototyping. It reduces the evaluation complexity of such distributed, network-based applications.

Evaluation Framework - Use Case ADAS

The presented evaluation framework enables the functional and timing verification, performance and reliability analysis and supports design space exploration. One of the main focuses of the framework is modularity and a generic approach to enable the analysis of a variety of different system alternatives. Therefore, the virtual prototype-based framework is structured in a multitude of basic modules. These modules are aggregated to form the desired system, e.g., the ADAS use case scenario is assembled from around 150 module instances. An extract is shown in figure 1. This allows an easy alteration of the system, such as changing the communication channel, by just replacing or extending the existing system using the appropriate modules. With this approach, it is possible to easily integrate new applications using already existing IP components. The virtual system is configured

Design category: