HOSA: Holistic scheduling and analysis for scalable fault-tolerant FlexRay design

FlexRay is a new industry standard for next-generation communication in automotives. Though there are a few recent researches on performance analysis of FlexRay, two important aspects of the FlexRay design have been overlooked. The first is a holistic integrated scheduling scheme that can handle both static and dynamic segments in a FlexRay network. The second is cost-effective and scalable fault-tolerance. In order to address these aspects, we propose a novel holistic scheduling scheme, called HOSA, which can provide scalable fault tolerance by using flexible and ease-of-use dual channel communication in FlexRay. HOSA is built upon a novel slot pilfering technique to schedule and optimize the available slots in both static and dynamic segments. Moreover, in order to achieve efficient implementation, we propose approximate computation, which can efficiently support cost-effective and holistic scheduling by judiciously obtaining the tradeoff between computation complexity and available pilfered slots. HOSA hence offers two salient features, i.e., providing fault-tolerance and improving bandwidth utilization. Extensive experiments based on synthetic test cases and real-world case studies demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of HOSA.