A lightweight middleware framework for vehicle networking application

There is a growing need for Vehicle Networking Applications VNAs development that does not require users to learn the details of VNA data processing and message transfer. VNAs have some special requirements differing from other general-purpose applications, such as real-time performance, extensibility, compatibility, and reusability. To meet with these requirements of the VNAs, we propose a lightweight middleware framework for VNAs in this article. In the middle framework, we design multi-layer middleware architecture to separate VNAs from the software platform and to improve the adaptability for the heterogeneous network and various vehicle networking communication protocols. Meanwhile, the middleware architecture consists of fixed and exchangeable modules to improve the middleware reusability. And the component bus is presented in a framework to standardize component interfaces to improve the extensibility of middleware. The framework has an efficient and simple structure to guarantee the real-time performance of data processing and message transferring. This middleware also provides a uniform communication mechanism to be compatible with other existing middleware. In this article, we describe the design ideas and the composition of each module in the middleware framework, and analyze the data flow in communication process. We also develop the middleware prototypes to verify the feasibility of the middleware framework. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.