RedCAN/sup TM/: simulations of two fault recovery algorithms for CAN

Abstract

We present the RedCAN concept to achieve fault tolerance against node and link failures in a CAN-bus system by means of configurable switches. The basic idea in RedCAN is to isolate faulty nodes or bus segments by configuring switches that will evade a faulty node or segment and exclude it from bus access. We propose changes to the original centralized protocol, vulnerable to single point failures, and show that with a new distributed algorithm considerable more efficiency can be achieved also when network size is growing. The distributed algorithm introduces redundancy and hereby increases robustness of the system. Furthermore, the new algorithm has logarithmic complexity, as opposed to the centralized algorithms linear complexity, as the number of nodes increase. The results were gathered through a new simulator, the "RedCAN Simulation Manager", also presented. Simulations allow assessing the break-even point between centralized and distributed algorithms reconfiguration latencies as well as give ideas for further research.