Fault-Tolerance Analysis of Mixed CAN/Switched Ethernet Architecture

CAN is a well known fieldbus standard used in safety critical applications of embedded systems. However, steadily increasing amount of exchanged information in such systems has led to the use of Switched Ethernet like solutions. Mixed CAN/Switched Ethernet architectures allow to bypass CAN limitations while preserving the widely used CAN technology. In order to use this kind of architecture in safety critical applications a complete fault tolerance analysis is mandatory. In this paper, we use a simulation-based fault-injection technique to analyse the impact of different types of errors on the percentage of application frames missing their deadlines. Results show that different types of errors don’t have the same impact on different types of traffic. Moreover, it is shown that the re-emission of corrupted frames can have a negative impact on the system’s global performance.