MSc Thesis in Traffic Shaping for Backend Protection in Connected Vehicles

Deterministic TCP Traffic Shaping for Backend Protection in Connected Vehiclese

Introduction

Thesis work is an excellent way to get closer to TRATON and build relationships for the future. Many of today's employees began their TRATON career with their degree project. 

Our team is responsible for developing and maintaining the Connectivity Platform, a brand-agnostic solution that enables unified communication and connectivity across trucks of all TRATON brands. We ensure that vehicles can reliably interact with backend systems and digital services, regardless of brand.

We work with an agile, product-oriented mindset, owning the platform end-to-end and driving its evolution to meet future needs. Our work spans multiple domains, including connectivity, hardware integration, security, and diagnostics, while ensuring scalability and high availability for millions of connected vehicles worldwide.

Background

Many connected vehicles communicate with shared backend services for telemetry, remote diagnostics, software updates, cloud services, navigation, and other applications. These services often share the same cellular connection and onboard communication infrastructure.

Traffic loads may vary across services and vehicles, resulting in changing bandwidth demand and potentially affecting latency, queue lengths, transmission rates, and communication predictability.

This thesis aims to design, implement, and evaluate an onboard TCP traffic-shaping system for connected vehicles, using predefined rules for shaping and scheduling. These rules provide deterministic traffic control, while end-to-end latency and throughput remain subject to variable cellular conditions.

The system is intended to help protect shared backend services from excessive outbound traffic generated by connected vehicles. It uses a TCP proxy to shape encrypted traffic according to configurable, service-specific policies designed to accommodate expected traffic while limiting disproportionate bandwidth use by service clients.

When application demand exceeds the configured shaping limits or available network capacity, data may accumulate in bounded buffers. Forwarding is regulated according to the selected policy, and TCP backpressure is used to constrain sending applications. This provides a basis for studying how different traffic policies influence throughput, latency, buffer occupancy, and service quality under challenging network conditions.

Historical traffic data may be used to support the configuration, scenario selection, and evaluation of the selected traffic-shaping model.

Objective

The objective of this thesis is to design, implement, and evaluate a deterministic TCP traffic-shaping system intended for onboard use in connected vehicles. The system will regulate variable application demand and help protect shared backend services from excessive traffic.

The proposed system will include:

• A transparent TCP proxy that relays TLS-encrypted byte streams without terminating TLS, using separate application-side and backend-side TCP connections.
• A selected traffic-shaping model with configurable parameters.
• Support for multiple selected services, each identified by its own TLS SNI value and assigned an individually configurable traffic-shaping policy.
• Monitoring of selected performance and service-quality metrics.
• A policy layer that enforces predefined shaping parameters.
• Bounded buffering and defined behavior when buffer limits are reached.
  
  

The study will evaluate different rate limits, burst capacities, and service-specific policies using both historical traffic data and controlled traffic scenarios. The evaluation will consider multiple competing TCP flows, parallel connections, and concurrent requests from the same service. Results will be compared with an unshaped baseline using the same proxy architecture.

The main objective is to determine how deterministic TCP traffic shaping affects useful application throughput, bandwidth utilization, queueing delay, buffer occupancy, fairness between competing flows and services, and application-level service quality. Service-quality metrics will be selected for the evaluated applications and may include transaction completion times, deadline misses, timeouts, and retry rates.

The thesis will also characterize the practical capabilities and limitations of TCP traffic shaping and identify suitable policies for different types of vehicle communication.

Job description

The tasks needed for this thesis work include:

• Review existing TCP traffic-shaping approaches and select a suitable model for connected-vehicle communication.
• Implement the selected model in a TCP proxy and evaluate it in a controlled simulation or emulation environment.
• Define the shaping enforcement point and byte-accounting model, including the treatment of protocol overhead and retransmissions, and verify compliance with configured rate and burst limits.
• Assess the use of available historical traffic data for configuring and evaluating the selected model.
• Design and execute representative test scenarios covering multiple competing flows, parallel connections from the same service, traffic bursts, varying network capacity, and buffer saturation. Verify compliance with configured shaping policies and evaluate performance and application-level service quality against an unshaped baseline.
• Prepare a report documenting the methodology, implementation, evaluation, and conclusions of the thesis.

Education/program/focus:

M.Sc. candidates with a relevant background are encouraged to apply.

Suitable qualifications include:

• Knowledge of TCP/IP and network traffic management.
• Experience with embedded systems or Linux networking.
• Experience with object-oriented programming.
• An interest in connected vehicles and dependable distributed systems.

Duration

Estimated duration: 20 weeks

Contact persons and supervisors

Lan Anh Trinh, [email protected]

Haimen Addabagh [email protected]

Application:

Your application must include a CV, personal letter and transcript of grades.

A background check might be conducted for this position. We are conducting interviews continuously and may close the recruitment earlier than the date specified.

Publication date from - to

2026-11-03 - 2026-11-22.