PDO Packing Mechanism for Reducing CANopen Network Utilization

CANopen which is one of the in-vehicle network (IVN) protocols is adopted to solve the hardware dependency problem of the CAN-based application. CANopen makes different CAN devices interoperable each others. By the advantage of the device profiling concept, it can make the period of developing CAN-based application system shorten. The utilization of CANopen network must be reduced to improve the communication performance (e.g. worst-case response time). For reducing network utilization, messages need to be packed as many as possible so that message frame overhead can be decreased. In this paper, we suggested a PDO packing mechanism using object dictionary (OD) and process data object (PDO) communication service in CANopen. Through experiments, the performance of the mechanism is evaluated with SAE benchmark. As a result, network utilization is decreased about 10% compared to the result of the previous works.