Evaluation of a Control Protocol for Testing an Automotive Ethernet TCP/IP Stack

The evolving of the networking application and electronic components are pushing the bandwidth limits in the automotive domain [19]. Consequently, the car manufacturers have begun to produce more complex Electronic Control Units (ECUs) to fulfil the automotive technology evolution. Car manufacturers have used ECUs from different vendors to get the most creative features in cars [19]. These ECUs requires a standard network interface such as Ethernet which can bring significant features such as high bandwidth, low weight and full duplex communication. Nowadays, Ethernet has adapted to apply in the automotive application. Therefore, it has called for a high degree of testing to ensure the safety and interoperability between these ECUs. However, the testing of the Automotive Ethernet is facing many challenges such as finding and solving the issues as early as possible in the development process. Besides that, testing an Automotive Ethernet TCP/IP stack is a complex task, as it required an upper tester to cause the implementation of the device under the test to move to specific states. AUTOSAR has defined a standardised control protocol (Test Stub) to use it as an upper tester for executing the AUTOSAR Acceptance Test (for TCP/IP stack) [6]. This protocol has used for conducting the test cases of the TCP, UDP and IP protocols in AUTOSAR [21] [22] [23]. OPEN Alliance has specified an Automotive Ethernet ECU test specification which covers more protocols than AUTOSAR such as ARP and DHCP [7]. Consequently, potential gaps and issues may arise when using the Test Stub to conduct the test cases of the OPEN Alliance, as it initially defined for conducting the AUTOSAR Acceptance Test. This work presents the evaluation of the Test Stub in context of using it to conduct the OPEN Alliance Automotive Ethernet ECU Test. Furthermore, it will introduce a solution to overcome the potential issues and gaps which may arise after using the Test Stub (defined by AUTOSAR) to conduct the test cases of the OPEN Alliance