Pushing the limits of CAN - scheduling frames with offsets provides a major performance boost

With the increasing amount of electronics, making best usage of the bandwidth becomes of primary importance in automotive networks. One solution that is being investigated by car manufacturers is to schedule the messages with offsets, which leads to a desynchronization of the message streams. As it will be shown, this “traffic shaping” strategy is very beneficial in terms of worst-case response times. In this chapter, the problem of choosing the best offsets is addressed in the case of Controller Area Network, which is a de-facto standard in the automotive world. Comprehensive experiments shown in this chapter give insight into the fundamental reasons why offsets are efficient, and demonstrate that offsets actually provide a major performance boost in terms of response times. These experimental results suggest that sound offset strategies may extend the lifespan of CAN further, and may defer the introduction of FlexRay and additional CAN networks. keywords: Controller Area Network, message scheduling, offsets, response times, resource optimization.