PDO packing mechanism for minimizing CANopen network utilization

CANopen was developed in order to resolve the hardware dependency problem of the CAN-based application. Using a concept called profiling in CANopen, it is allowed that different types of devices can interoperate with each other, which leads to the reduction of the development time for CAN-based application. The utilization of CANopen network needs to be minimized in the context of the communication performance. In order to minimize network utilization, messages need to be packed as many as possible so that message frame overhead can decrease. In this paper, a PDO packing mechanism using object dictionary (OD) and process data object (PDO) communication service in CANopen is presented. We also evaluate the performance of the mechanism with SAE benchmark data, and finally, it is seen that the network utilization of CANopen decreased by about 10% when comparing to the result in [9,10].