Raw vehicle bus traffic is notoriously cryptic: a steering angle signal might reside in CAN ID 0x12A, packed across bits 16 to 27 with an offset of -500 and a scale factor of 0.05. Building cloud microservices around such hardware-dependent DBC files creates brittle software that breaks whenever a microcontroller vendor updates silicon. In this article, we examine how modern SDV gateways leverage Eclipse KUKSA.val to decouple hardware buses from cloud applications.
The KUKSA.val runtime separates signal acquisition into modular 'feeders'. A CAN feeder binds to Linux SocketCAN interfaces (can0, vcan0), extracts bitfields using DBC or ARXML matrix definitions, and pushes strongly-typed signals to the KUKSA Databroker via high-performance gRPC IPC. The Databroker validates every signal against the compiled VSS schema, maintaining the in-memory state tree with zero allocation overhead.
Once signals are normalized in the Databroker, external microservices subscribe via gRPC server-streaming or WebSockets. An edge cloud bridge daemon aggregates change events across designated paths (e.g. Vehicle.Speed, Vehicle.Cabin.Door.Row1.Left.IsOpen), batches them according to dynamic network congestion heuristics, and streams them securely via mTLS into cloud message brokers like Apache Kafka or AWS IoT Core.