Continuous Automotive Software Updates through Container Image Layers

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper deals with the problem of software updates in electronic control units of commercial vehicles. It is mainly based on the previously published work of the authors, listed as reference Nr. 23. The original publication was extended considerably, advocating a resubmission as a journal article.

The main contribution is perceived in the survey of software related issues given in the introductory sections providing a comprehensive discussion of existing approaches. This may attract quite a wide audience not directly working in the respective automotive domain.

The original result claimed by the authors is a proposition of a methodology of container-based software updating. This part is somewhat abstract and quite concise. I believe that the idea of layers sharing is quite known in the field of embedded SW development. Experimental results are provided as well demonstrating potential download times and storage requirements reduction.  However, the given benchmark is rather synthetic and the achieved results would perhaps deserve a more thorough explanation. I understand that it may be difficult to extrapolate generic conclusions from a single experiment, but at least an attempt to quantify the foreseen advantages in average bandwidth and storage requirements in realistic ECU update scenarios would be helpful to evaluate the potential of the proposed approach.

To wrap up, I find the submitted manuscript to be a good quality survey paper with a somewhat “lighter” original contribution which could be perhaps elaborated in more detail. Nevertheless, the paper is recommended for publication.

Author Response

 

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper presents automotive software updates through container image layers. The paper is well organized and is rich of information. Most references come from  international journal papers and international conference papers. However, there are many important patents that focus on this issue. The reviewer would like to suggest that the authors can add some important patents in the references. In addition, Fig. 2 is not clear enough. A revision is required. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf