Controller Area Network for fault tolerant small satellite system design

The Controller Area Network (CAN) is a message based event triggered communication bus mostly used in the automotive industry. In this paper, however, the CAN bus is tested for being applicable to small satellite systems in order to provide better fault-tolerance. The CAN bus connects several independent CAN modules and allows them to communicate and work together asynchronously and/or synchronously. The CAN modules were designed to decrease weight and cost while improving stability and power consumption compared to current small satellite systems. We present advantages to using the CAN bus over existing satellite bus systems, design and propose a CAN protocol for CubeSats.