The automotive industry is transitioning from traditional ECU-based systems to software-defined vehicles. A central role of this revolution is played by containers, lightweight virtualization technologies that enable the flexible consolidation of complex software applications on a common hardware platform. Despite their widespread adoption, the impact of containerization on fundamental real-time metrics such as end-to-end latency, communication jitter, as well as memory and CPU utilization has remained virtually unexplored. This paper presents a microservice architecture for a real-world autonomous driving application where containers isolate each service. Our comprehensive evaluation shows the benefits in terms of end-to-end latency of such a solution even over standard bare-Linux deployments. Specifically, in the case of the presented microservice architecture, the mean end-to-end latency can be improved by 5-8 %. Also, the maximum latencies were significantly reduced using container deployment.

翻译：汽车行业正从传统的基于ECU的系统向软件定义车辆转型。在这场变革中，容器技术发挥着核心作用——作为一种轻量级虚拟化技术，它能够灵活地将复杂的软件应用整合到通用硬件平台上。尽管容器技术已得到广泛应用，但其对端到端延迟、通信抖动、内存及CPU利用率等关键实时性能指标的影响迄今仍未得到充分探究。本文针对现实自动驾驶应用提出了一种微服务架构，其中每个服务均由容器进行隔离。我们的综合评估表明，即便与标准裸机Linux部署相比，该方案在端到端延迟方面仍具有优势。具体而言，在所提出的微服务架构中，平均端到端延迟可降低5%-8%。此外，采用容器部署后，最大延迟也显著减小。