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Serial communication by means of CAN is being used more and more for data transfer between in-vehicle control units to link components of the drive train, body electronics and mobile communication electronics. In order to design distributed electronic systems, software engineers today must not only develop the application software but also supply the communication software to handle the communication hardware, thereby reinventing the wheel with each new application software package. This procedure is inefficient as it leads to hardly reusable special solutions. To avoid incompatibilities between the modules of a distributed system a lot of additional coordination work must be done during the design phase. As a consequence, each new software package is faced with additional costs for the indispensible tests of the communication software. This paper describes a network architecture that has been designed for CAN systems.

Signals in Automotive Communication Networks often represent safety relevant information. Therefore, automotive network protocols provide multiple powerful mechanisms for error detection and for error reporting. The objective is to ensure that on average less than one undetected error occurs during the lifetime of a vehicle. This places an upper bound on the residual error probability of the communication network. The determination of this residual error probability requires new methods in order to account for the interaction of the various error detection mechanisms. This paper presents an analysis method that has been developed for the investigation of the CAN protocol. This comprehensive investigation distinguishes two types of errors that contribute most significantly to the residual error probability of the CAN protocol. Errors of one type transform stuffbits into information bits or vice versa, and are related to the use of variable bit stuffing.