Categorizing and Analysis of Activated Faults in the FlexRay Communication Controller Registers

FlexRay communication protocol is expected becoming the de-facto standard for distributed safety-critical systems. In this paper, transient single bit-flip faults were injected into the FlexRay communication controller to categorize and analyze the activated faults. In this protocol, an activated fault results in one or more error types which are boundary violation, conflict, content, freeze, synchronization, and syntax. To study the activated faults, a FlexRay bus network, composed of four nodes, was modeled by verilog HDL; and a total of 135,600 transient faults were injected in only one node, where 9,342 (6.9%) of the faults were activated. The results show that the synchronization error is the widespread error with the occurrence ratio of about 70.1%. The Boundary violation and the syntax errors have the occurrence ratios of 32.4% and 24.6%, respectively. The results also show that the Freeze error which more frequent resulted system failures has the occurrence ratio of about 17.3%.