Software-defined vehicle backplanes must span from tiny 16-bit microcontrollers in door modules to massive 2,000-core neural network accelerators in the trunk. Eclipse Zenoh bridges this extreme heterogeneity with a single unified data plane, allowing microcontrollers to publish telemetry directly to cloud digital twins through transparent multi-hop routers.
Running standard DDS or MQTT on a 32-bit Cortex-M microcontroller requires megabytes of memory and bloated networking libraries. Zenoh-Pico requires under 15KB of flash and 3KB of RAM. Operating over CAN XL or serial links, Zenoh-Pico maps integer Resource IDs to vehicle signals, enabling microcontrollers to publish temperature or lock states with negligible packet overhead.
Zenoh switches and routers forward messages across heterogeneous network boundaries without decrypting or re-serializing the payload. A door lock event travels from Zenoh-Pico over CAN XL to a zonal gateway running Zenoh-Router, hops over 10G Ethernet to the central compute unit, and bridges over cellular 5G to the OEM cloud twin with sub-10ms total latency.