Maintaining data consistency in ReCANcentrate during hub decouplings

Abstract

The use of CAN in safety-critical applications has been controversial due to dependability limitations. To overcome some of them, we proposed a replicated star topology, ReCANcentrate, whose hubs incorporate fault-treatment and fault tolerance mechanisms. The two hubs of ReCANcentrate are coupled with each other, thereby forcing a single communication domain that simplifies the management of the replicated media that each node performs to ensure data consistency. This paper proposes additional mechanisms to enforce data consistency even when hubs become temporarily or permanently decoupled.