Ordering messages in virtual CAN networks

The automotive industry is at the verve to deploy computer systems not only for safety-related and comfort functionality, but for safety-critical by-wire systems. While the CAN protocol is prevalent in present day automotive networks, safety-critical by-wire systems will employ time-triggered architectures. Virtual CAN networks on top of a time-triggered communication protocol are a solution to integrate existing CAN-based applications into such a time-triggered architecture. Thus, there is the possibility to eliminate physical CAN networks, which leads to cost reductions and reliability improvements. In order to ensure that existing CAN-based software works correctly in a time-triggered architecture, a virtual CAN network must provide the temporal behavior of a physical CAN network. For this reason, we develop a solution for establishing in a virtual CAN network the same temporal message order as in a physical CAN network. We present a CAN emulation service and provide validation results based on an implementation in the Time-Triggered Architecture.