Towards the integration of flexible-time-triggered communication and replicated star topologies in CAN

There is a growing interest in making the CAN field-bus more suitable for dependable applications. In the past years, several dependability limitations of CAN have already been addressed and a significant number of solutions are available. Nevertheless, the integration of these solutions into a single communication infrastructure is still an open issue. In this paper we discuss the integration of two specific solutions: FTT-CAN and ReCANcentrate. FTT-CAN is a higher-layer protocol that guarantees flexible real-time scheduling of CAN messages; whereas ReCANcentrate is a duplicated star topology for CAN that includes several enhanced mechanisms for media fault tolerance. We show how they are integrated into a single architecture that preserves the properties of each solution.