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Acronyms and glossary

Every acronym used across ARCHITECTURE.md and the other program docs, explained in plain language and grouped by field. Not auto-generated — update it by hand alongside ARCHITECTURE.md when a new acronym enters the vocabulary (same discipline as AGENTS.md's other cross-referenced docs).

Two acronyms are genuinely ambiguous in this project's own docs, depending on context — flagged inline where they occur: UDS (Unix Domain Socket vs. Unified Diagnostic Services) and OSI (ASAM's simulator interface vs. the classic 7-layer networking model — vxedge only ever means the former).

5G / RAN / mobile core

The vxedge core-network/RAN stack (Open5GS + UERANSIM), relevant to H2 and the open5gs-ueransim-patterns skill.

  • 5G — Fifth-generation cellular network standard; the slicing technology H2 tests.
  • RAN — Radio Access Network. The base-station side of the network (here: UERANSIM's simulated gNB).
  • CN — Core Network. The non-radio side (AMF, SMF, UPF, etc.) — here: Open5GS.
  • gNB — "next-generation NodeB," the 5G base station.
  • UE — User Equipment. The device connecting to the network — here, a simulated modem (UERANSIM) inside a zone/pod, not a phone.
  • UERANSIM — Open-source UE + RAN simulator; vxedge's RAN implementation.
  • PDU (session) — Packet Data Unit session: the data connection a UE establishes to reach a network (roughly, "the tunnel that carries its traffic").
  • S-NSSAI — Single Network Slice Selection Assistance Information: the identifier for one network slice, made of an SST + optional SD.
  • SST — Slice/Service Type: the broad category of a slice (e.g. "URLLC-like").
  • SD — Slice Differentiator: a finer-grained tag distinguishing slices that share an SST.
  • URSP — UE Route Selection Policy: rules that tell a UE which slice to send a given traffic class over.
  • URLLC — Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication: the 5G traffic class the ADAS slice is modeled on.
  • DNN — Data Network Name: the network a PDU session connects to (successor to the older term APN, Access Point Name).
  • AMF — Access and Mobility Management Function: handles UE registration/mobility.
  • SMF — Session Management Function: manages PDU sessions.
  • UPF — User Plane Function: actually forwards user traffic (the data-plane NF).
  • NRF — Network Repository Function: lets core NFs discover each other.
  • AUSF — Authentication Server Function.
  • UDM / UDR — Unified Data Management / Unified Data Repository: subscriber data functions.
  • PCF — Policy Control Function.
  • BSF — Binding Support Function.
  • NSSF — Network Slice Selection Function: picks the right slice for a UE.
  • NF — Network Function: generic term for any of the boxes above.
  • SBI — Service-Based Interface: the HTTP-based protocol core NFs use to talk to each other.
  • PFCP — Packet Forwarding Control Protocol: the SMF↔UPF control channel.
  • NGAP — NG Application Protocol: the signaling protocol between gNB and AMF.
  • NAS — Non-Access Stratum: UE↔core signaling that rides over, but is logically independent of, the radio link.
  • N2 / N3 — 3GPP reference points: N2 is gNB↔AMF (control), N3 is gNB↔UPF (data) — vxedge's CN-pod↔RAN-pod transit subnet stands in for both.
  • GTP / GTP-U — GPRS Tunneling Protocol (User plane): how UPF tunnels a UE's actual traffic.
  • SCTP — Stream Control Transmission Protocol: the transport NGAP rides on.
  • SA — Standalone (5G SA = a 5G core end-to-end, not anchored on 4G) — the architecture the DT/BMW/Valeo/Ericsson/Qualcomm slicing trial vxedge cites reproduced.
  • V2X — Vehicle-to-Everything: umbrella term for vehicle wireless comms.
  • V2V / V2I — Vehicle-to-Vehicle / Vehicle-to-Infrastructure.
  • RSU — Roadside Unit: a V2I endpoint (phase-3 node type).
  • PC5 — The 3GPP sidelink interface used for direct V2X (no core network hop).

SDN & Linux networking (vxgateway)

The vxgateway data plane, relevant to network-provisioning-patterns.

  • SDN — Software-Defined Networking: separating the control logic from the packet forwarding — vxgateway's whole premise.
  • OVS — Open vSwitch: a software switch; one of vxgateway's two bridge backends.
  • OVSDB — Open vSwitch Database protocol: how OVS is configured/queried.
  • VLAN — Virtual LAN: tags that separate traffic on one physical/virtual wire — how vxgateway maps slices today (mode: vlan).
  • VXLAN — Virtual Extensible LAN: tunnels VLAN-style segments across hosts.
  • HTB — Hierarchical Token Bucket: the Linux tc queueing discipline vxgateway uses for per-slice bandwidth guarantees.
  • rtnetlink — The Linux kernel's netlink socket family for network configuration; the planned successor to today's iproute2-shell-out backend.
  • FRR — FRRouting: open-source routing daemon suite (provides vxgateway's BGP).
  • BGP — Border Gateway Protocol: the routing protocol FRR speaks for cloud interconnect.
  • TSN — Time-Sensitive Networking: deterministic-latency Ethernet extensions (phase-3 gateway variant).
  • gPTP / PTP — (generalized) Precision Time Protocol: clock sync TSN depends on.
  • NOS — Network Operating System: SONiC (SONiC-VS) is vxedge's "production NOS twin."
  • BASE-T1 (100BASE-T1 / 1000BASE-T1) — Automotive Ethernet PHY standards vxgateway's link impairments emulate.
  • DPDK — Data Plane Development Kit; VPP — Vector Packet Processing (FD.io): a kernel-bypass data-plane option for URLLC-focused runs.
  • DOCA — NVIDIA's SDK for offloading OVS/tc-style intent onto a BlueField DPU (phase-4 hardware exit ramp).
  • CAN — Controller Area Network; LIN — Local Interconnect Network: legacy automotive buses, modeled via type: can links (phase 3).
  • SocketCAN / vcan — Linux's native CAN subsystem / its virtual-CAN device.
  • DBC — A CAN database file format defining frame layouts (used by restbus simulation to map CAN ↔ VSS).

SDV & automotive E/E architecture

  • SDV — Software-Defined Vehicle: a vehicle whose behavior is primarily defined by software, not fixed wiring — vxedge's whole subject.
  • E/E — Electrical/Electronic (architecture): how a vehicle's electronics are wired and organized (zonal vs. domain-based, etc.).
  • ECU — Electronic Control Unit: an embedded computer controlling one vehicle function — what vxedge's "zones" stand in for.
  • ADAS — Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems: the URLLC-like traffic class H1/H2 test.
  • AD — Autonomous Driving.
  • HMI — Human-Machine Interface. In-vehicle: Android Automotive (AAOS) or an embedded Qt/QML IVI/cluster loadable — two real, alternate infotainment-zone guest baselines (§9). There is no Qt/QML operator dashboard (corrected 2026-08-06); any platform monitoring dashboard is web-based or the CLI (ARCHITECTURE.md §5.1).
  • AUTOSAR — AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture: the standard automotive software architecture vxedge's QNX/C++ conventions are described as "adjacent" to.
  • OEM — Original Equipment Manufacturer: the vehicle maker — vxedge's target audience/adopter.
  • VSS — Vehicle Signal Specification: COVESA's standard catalog of vehicle signal names (speed, door state, etc.), used via the Kuksa databroker.
  • COVESA — Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance: the standards body behind VSS/Kuksa.
  • BMS — Battery Management System: one of the comfort/EV zone workloads modeled.
  • HVAC — Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning: another comfort-zone workload.
  • GMSL / FPD-Link — Gigabit Multimedia Serial Link / Flat Panel Display Link: the physical transport real camera/sensor data rides in a vehicle (vxedge substitutes slice traffic through vxgateway instead).
  • UDS (automotive sense) — Unified Diagnostic Services: the ISO 14229 diagnostic protocol behind the phase-3 UDS/DoIP probe. Not to be confused with the networking sense below.
  • DoIP — Diagnostics over IP: carries UDS diagnostics over Ethernet/IP.
  • SAE — Society of Automotive Engineers: standards body (e.g. the WCX venue).

Virtualization & zones

  • VM — Virtual Machine.
  • KVM — Kernel-based Virtual Machine: the Linux hypervisor vxedge builds on.
  • QEMU — Quick EMUlator: the machine emulator KVM uses; also runs standalone as the qemu-microvm zone backend.
  • QMP — QEMU Machine Protocol: how the microVM backend controls QEMU directly.
  • microVM — A minimal-device-model QEMU machine type, for lower overhead than a full VM.
  • QNX / SDP — QNX Software Development Platform 8: the real-time OS used for ADAS/safety zone guests.
  • RTOS — Real-Time Operating System (Zephyr, FreeRTOS, QNX).
  • AAOS — Android Automotive OS: the infotainment zone guest.
  • MCU — Microcontroller Unit: the class of chip Renode-backed zones emulate at register level.
  • GPIO / I2C / SPI / PWM / ADC — Low-level hardware I/O buses/peripherals (General-Purpose I/O, Inter-Integrated Circuit, Serial Peripheral Interface, Pulse Width Modulation, Analog-to-Digital Converter) — the register-level I/O layer QEMU device models / Renode expose to guests.
  • NAND / UBI — Flash storage technology; came up as a reason Rugix (not RAUC) fits vxedge's QEMU/libvirt block-storage bundles (no real NAND to manage).

Compute, AI & GPU (vxparts: hpc-class parts)

  • GPU — Graphics Processing Unit.
  • CUDA — NVIDIA's parallel-compute platform/API.
  • TensorRT — NVIDIA's inference-optimization SDK (DeepStream pipelines target it).
  • DCGM — Data Center GPU Manager; NVML — NVIDIA Management Library: how GPU utilization/VRAM/thermal metrics get collected.
  • VRAM — Video RAM (GPU memory) — one of the tracked GPU metrics.
  • MIG — Multi-Instance GPU: NVIDIA's hardware GPU-partitioning feature (resources.gpu: mig-slice).
  • ROS2 — Robot Operating System 2: the middleware Autoware runs on.
  • DDS — Data Distribution Service: the pub/sub protocol standard under ROS2.
  • rmw — ROS MiddleWare: ROS2's pluggable transport layer (rmw_zenoh vs. rmw_fastrtps).
  • CARLA — Open-source autonomous-driving simulator (proper name, not an acronym); the source of realistic sensor/perception traffic.
  • LLM — Large Language Model: relevant to track M's GenAI-authored-experiment goal.

API & software architecture (vxAPI)

  • API — Application Programming Interface.
  • gRPC — Google's RPC framework (originally "gRPC Remote Procedure Calls"); the transport vxAPI is built on.
  • RPC — Remote Procedure Call: a function call made across a network boundary.
  • IDL — Interface Definition Language: the Protobuf .proto files describing vxAPI's contract.
  • Protobuf — Protocol Buffers: Google's binary serialization format, the wire format gRPC uses.
  • SDK — Software Development Kit: the generated per-language vxAPI client libraries (Rust/tonic, TypeScript/connect-es).
  • CLI — Command-Line Interface: the vxedge binary, a thin vxAPI client.
  • UDS (networking sense) — Unix Domain Socket: vxedge's default local transport between the CLI and vxedged. Not to be confused with the automotive sense above.
  • mTLS — mutual Transport Layer Security: both client and server present certificates — vxedge's remote-transport auth.
  • TLS — Transport Layer Security: the encryption protocol mTLS builds on.
  • OIDC — OpenID Connect: the bearer-token auth scheme for remote vxAPI access.
  • REST — Representational State Transfer: the alternative API style vxAPI deliberately isn't (it's gRPC), though an optional REST façade is possible later.
  • gRPC-Web — A gRPC variant browsers can call directly; how the web dashboard/Electron frontends reach vxAPI.
  • JSON — JavaScript Object Notation: used for --json CLI output and iproute2's machine-readable reads.
  • YAML — the manifest file format (experiment/vehicle manifests).
  • FFI — Foreign Function Interface: cross-language function calling (relevant to any native bindings).
  • OCI — Open Container Initiative: the standard container image format Podman images conform to.
  • GHCR — GitHub Container Registry: where container images get published with digests.
  • MCP — Model Context Protocol: the open standard AI agent tooling (Claude Code and others) uses to call external tools. vxmcp (phase 3) is vxAPI's MCP server — a thin frontend for agents, the same role the CLI plays for a human at a terminal.
  • MRTR — Multi Round-Trip Request: MCP spec 2026-07-28's mechanism for a tool call that needs a follow-up (e.g. a confirmation) before it can complete, without a held-open bidirectional stream — how vxmcp's mutating tools ask their caller to confirm before running, the agent-tooling equivalent of the CLI's own explicit verbs.
  • rmcp — the official Rust SDK for MCP (modelcontextprotocol/rust-sdk); vxmcp's chosen implementation, reached spec-2026-07-28 Tier-1 conformance 2026-07-31.

Standards, modeling & simulation (track M)

  • SysML — Systems Modeling Language: the modeling language vxmodels authors in (v2 specifically — textual, git-diffable).
  • OMG — Object Management Group: the standards body that owns SysML.
  • MBSE — Model-Based Systems Engineering: the discipline SysML/track M applies.
  • INCOSE — International Council on Systems Engineering: an MBSE-adjacent standards community.
  • ASAM — Association for Standardization of Automation and Measurement Systems: the body behind OSI/OpenSCENARIO.
  • OSI (ASAM sense) — Open Simulation Interface: the boundary standard between a world simulator (CARLA) and the AD stack (phase 4). vxedge never means the classic networking "7-layer OSI model."
  • OpenSCENARIO — ASAM's standard format for traffic/scenario definitions (phase-4 mapping target for CARLA scenarios).
  • FMI / FMU — Functional Mock-up Interface / Functional Mock-up Unit: the standard for importing plant models (e.g. Simulink-exported) into vxplant.
  • XIL — X-in-the-Loop: umbrella term for SIL (Software-in-the-Loop) and HIL (Hardware-in-the-Loop) testing — vxedge aims to speak the same bench-API semantics as OEM HIL rigs.

OTA & security (vxota)

  • OTA — Over-The-Air (update): vxota's whole subject, and H4's workload.
  • Uptane — An automotive-specific, TUF-derived OTA security framework; vxota follows its metadata shape without depending on its reference implementation.
  • TUF — The Update Framework: the general (non-automotive) update-security spec Uptane derives from.
  • RAUC — Robust Auto-Update Controller: an established atomic-update tool, considered as vxota's phase-3 slot-update fallback.
  • Rugix (Ctrl) — A Rust-native atomic-update tool; vxota's preferred phase-3 candidate over RAUC (Rust-policy fit).

Methodology, reproducibility & DevOps

  • CI / CD — Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery: automated build/test/publish pipelines (GitHub Actions here).
  • PR — Pull Request.
  • RTT — Round-Trip Time: the core latency metric vxprobe measures.
  • IQR — Interquartile Range: the spread measure used to judge whether a rerun's numbers are "reproducible" (within the original's IQR).
  • p50 / p95 / p99 — Percentile latency notation (the value below which 50%/95%/99% of samples fall) — not an acronym, but ubiquitous enough to define: p99 is the "worst-case-ish" tail latency figure.
  • RSS — Resident Set Size: a process's actual in-memory footprint, one of H3's resource-cost metrics.
  • SHA256 — The cryptographic hash algorithm used to digest-tag every manifest, image, and archive for reproducibility.
  • CSV — Comma-Separated Values: the tabular result-export format.
  • SemVer — Semantic Versioning: the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH convention every repo follows.
  • LTS — Long-Term Support (e.g. an OS/toolchain release channel).
  • PPA — Personal Package Archive: an Ubuntu third-party package source (the now-removed host Open5GS install came from one).
  • NOPASSWD — A sudoers option letting a specific command run without a password prompt — how vxedged gets CAP_NET_ADMIN-requiring privileges without running as root.
Cite this page

Djaafri, F. (2026). vxedge: Acronyms. Documentation, version 0.2.0, commit 33ede87. https://vxedge.dev/docs/ACRONYMS.html

@misc{djaafrivxedgeacronyms2026,
  author = {Djaafri, Fouzi},
  title  = {vxedge: Acronyms},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://vxedge.dev/docs/ACRONYMS.html},
  note   = {Documentation, version 0.2.0, source commit 33ede87}
}