A router for improved fault isolation, scalability and diagnosis in CAN

Controller Area Network (CAN) provides an inexpensive and robust network technology in many application domains. However, the use of CAN is constrained by limitations with respect to fault isolation, bandwidth, wire length, namespaces and diagnosis. This paper presents a solution to overcome these limitations by replacing the CAN bus with a star topology. We introduce a CAN router that detects and isolates node failures in the value and time domain. The CAN router ensures that minimum message interarrival times are satisfied and reserves CAN identifiers for individual CAN nodes. In addition, the CAN router exploits knowledge about communication relationships for a more efficient use of communication bandwidth through multicast messaging. An implementation of the CAN router based on a Multi-Processor System-on-a-Chip (MPSoC) shows the feasibility of the proposed solution.