Eclipse uProtocol

Docs & Media

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 13:46:05 +0100

uProtocol motivation

A motivation and explanation for the uProtocol approach

Documents

Blueprints

The Eclipse SDV Blueprints project hosts various showcases of how to build solutions using Eclipse SDV open source components. The following blueprints include uProtocol and can be used for instructional and inspirational purposes:

Videos

Steven Hartley & Daniel Krippner talking about uProtocol at Eclipse OCx 2024 in Mainz
Steven Hartley & Kai Hudalla Discuss Eclipse uProtocol and Collaboration Among Eclipse SDV Projects
Pete LeVasseur about Eclipse uProtocol: Open Source Software Defined Vehicle Framework at GOSIM China 2024

uProtocol Explainer

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 13:40:45 +0100

Communication has two important dimensions, no matter whether it involves living beings or technical systems: the message and the medium. Or, in very loose analogy, semantics and syntax.

Message/semantics concerns what is being communicated: two persons agreeing on the same words and concepts will be able to have a conversation no matter whether they use voice, text, sign language, morse code, etc. This is the content.

Medium/semantics is about how to transfer desired information: any series of symbols (‘messages’) can be transmitted between communicating parties, as long as they agree on the mechanism to use and are able to work with it. This is the plumbing ¹.

Why do we need this?

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 04:14:54 -0800

The automotive industry faces a number of challenges related to software communication:

In-vehicle communication is largely inherited from legacy architectures that were mostly based on CAN networks. In addition to mechatronics software for which the existing infrastructure was developed, vehicles now include multiple powerful SoCs that run massive amounts of software. This software requires new communications mechanisms.
Vehicles are now connected to the cloud and other devices like mobile phones. These communication links need to recover from loss of connection and provide secure data transmission, imposing additional requirements on the communications framework.
Access to vehicle data from the cloud and sharing of this data in the cloud, drives yet other requirements such as scaling and reliability.
Despite having varying requirements, all above requirements aim at transferring the same vehicle-related data, and end up being served by the same software components running that produce the data.
Defining specific communication patterns for each and every environment results into redundant work, unnecessary complexity and potential incompatibilities.

Eclipse uProtocol™ addresses these challenges by providing a small number of communication patterns, exposed via a consistent set of programming APIs which are available across the whole vehicle eco-system (in-vehicle ECUs, cloud and mobile). This approach enables seamless communication between applications and services, regardless of where they are deployed. Using uProtocol, application developers can focus on implementing differentiating functionality, rather than the low-level plumbing necessary to access relevant services they require. On the other hand, service providers can implement their service once for all consumers, wherever they are hosted.