Shared Memory Buffers for Vehicle Sensor Data Distribution
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Solution Overview
Problem
In vehicles equipped with a large number of sensors, particularly those that produce significant amounts of data like cameras, the transport of sensor data to clients can experience performance issues due to limited bandwidth, leading to delays and overburdened resources.
Innovation Solution
A sensor service within the vehicle employs a shared memory model to distribute sensor data from sensors to clients, using buffers in shared memory to store and manage sensor data, thereby avoiding bandwidth-limited data transfers.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If sensor data is transported through traditional data transfer mechanisms, then data can be delivered to clients, but bandwidth limitations cause delays and resource overburden
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the sensor data storage and client access functions into a unified shared memory space. Multiple sensors write data to shared memory buffers, and multiple clients read from the same buffers simultaneously, eliminating the need for repeated data copying and reducing bandwidth consumption. This combining approach allows efficient multi-producer multi-consumer data access without traditional data transfer overhead.
2Adaptability or versatility
If more sensors are added to the vehicle, then monitoring capability is improved, but data transport burden increases
Solution Approach 1:
The shared memory buffers serve multiple functions simultaneously: they act as data storage for any sensor, provide direct access for any client, and enable efficient data distribution across multiple data streams. This universal data access mechanism handles data from multiple sensors without requiring separate transport mechanisms for each sensor-client pair, reducing overall system complexity.
3Ease of operation
If traditional data transfer methods are used, then data can be accessed by clients, but resource overburden occurs due to repeated data copying
Solution Approach 1:
The patent eliminates unnecessary data copying by allowing clients to directly access sensor data in shared memory through memory mapping. Instead of copying data from sensor memory to client memory repeatedly, the system creates virtual memory mappings that allow clients to read sensor data directly from the shared memory buffers, significantly reducing processing overhead and energy consumption.
Data Source
AI summary
In some examples, a sensor service receives an indication of interest from a client for sensor data of a first sensor of the plurality of sensors, and allocates buffers in the memory for the plurality of sensors. The sensor service provides a first buffer to a sensor connector that is to receive the sensor data from the first sensor, and receives, from the sensor connector, an indication that the first buffer in the memory has been written with the sensor data from the first sensor. Based on the indication of interest from the client, the sensor service notifies the client that the first buffer is available for reading by the client from the memory.