Design and quantitative evaluation of a novel FlexRay Bus Guardian

FlexRay is a communication system whose development was driven explicitly by the new needs of future in-car control applications. However, as far as babbling idiot avoidance is concerned, FlexRay does not provide a satisfactory solution. Therefore, a novel Bus Guardian (BG) is designed to avoid the babbling idiot failure in FlexRay communication systems in this paper. To minimize the affects of common mode failure between the novel BG and the associated node, the novel BG operates with an independent clock synchronization process. The supervision algorithm of the novel BG is presented and performance evaluation is done based on message worst case response time (WCRT) analysis. Evaluation results show that the increase in WCRT by including babbling idiot protection is bounded and small and the novel BG can enforce error containment in the time domain of FlexRay communication systems.