Bandwidth-efficient burst error tolerance in TDMA-based CAN networks

Many distributed control systems employ TDMA-based communication over CAN in order to meet realtime constraints. Whilst this form of media access control brings several timeliness benefits, studies have also illustrated negative effects on transmission reliability. This paper extends the `window transmission´ technique which was recently proposed by the authors to help overcome this problem in TDMA-based networks to include the effects of correlated (burst) errors. This paper employs a simple Markov model to describe burst error behaviors in a CAN network, and the model is used to develop an algorithm for calculating TDMA slot sizes which aim to provide prespecified statistical guarantees of message delivery. Computational results are presented which indicate that the technique can reduce the amount of bandwidth needed for specified reliability levels by a significant factor when compared to the use of message duplicates. The paper is concluded with an empirical study which provides further supportive evidence for the described technique.