Evaluation of admissible CAN bus load with weak synchronization mechanism

Scheduling frames with offsets has been shown in the literature to be very beneficial for reducing response times in real-time networks because it allows the workload to be better spread over time and thus to reduce peaks of load. In the specific case of CAN, the response time is mainly related to the priority assignment, but offsets can still improve the achievable bus load. When it exists a global clock, a good offsets assignment leads to a TDMA medium access. When each node have its own local clock the use of offsets still spreads the workload over time. However, on CAN, global clock is hardly implemented in practice since using a global clock often requires dedicated hardware and complicates the sharing of the bus with non-synchronized nodes. That is why, we previously introduce the notion of bounded phases, a tradeoff between global and local clocks. Bounded phases allows an affordable synchronization with standard CAN controllers and reduces delays with regard to local clocks. Through an experiment on 5,000 configurations, we have shown that the maximal bus load that can be reached is 80%in the case of bounded phases

Traversal time for weakly synchronized CAN bus

Scheduling frames with offsets has been shown in the literature to be very beneficial for reducing response times in realtime networks because it allows the workload to be better spread over time and thus to reduce peaks of load. Maintaining a global synchronization amongst the stations induces substantial overhead and complexity in networks not providing a global time service such as CAN. Indeed, on CAN, no global clock is implemented in practice and each station possesses its own local clock. Without a global clock, the de-synchronization between the streams of frames created by offsets remains local to each station. The first contribution of this work is to show that important gains with respect to the communication latencies, around 40% in our experiments, can be achieved if we implement bounded clock desynchronization, also refered to as bounded phases, between the stations. The second contribution of this work is to provide a set of network-calculus based timing analyses to handle systems with bounded phases and compare their performances

Freshness and Reactivity Analysis in Globally Asynchronous Locally Time-Triggered Systems

International audienceCritical embedded systems are often designed as a set of real-time tasks, running on shared computing modules, and communicating through networks. Because of their critical nature, such systems have to meet timing properties. To help the designers to prove the correctness of their system, the real-time systems community has developed numerous approaches for analyzing the worst case times either on the processors (e.g. worst case execution time of a task) or on the networks (e.g. worst case traversal time of a message). However, there is a growing need to consider the complete system and to be able to determine end-to-end properties. Such properties apply to a functional chain which describes the behavior of a sequence of functions, not necessarily hosted on a shared module, from an input until the production of an output. This paper explores two end-to-end properties: freshness and reactivity, and presents an analysis method based on Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). This work is supported by the French National Research Agency within the Satrimmap project

Model Checking the FlexRay Startup Phase

This report describes a discrete-time model of the startup phase of a FlexRay network. The startup behaviour of this network is analysed in the presence of several faults. It is shown that in certain cases a faulty node can prevent the network from communicating altogether. One previously unknown scenario is uncovered

End-to-end latency and temporal consistency analysis in networked real-time systems

International audienceCritical embedded systems are often designed as a set of real-time tasks, running on shared computing modules, and communicating through networks. Because of their critical nature, such systems have to meet strict timing properties. To help the designers to prove the correctness of their system, the real-time systems community has developed numerous approaches for analysing the worst case scenarios either on the processors (e.g., worst case response time of a task) or on the networks (e.g., worst case traversal time of a message). These approaches provide results only for local components behaviours. However, there is a growing need for having a global view of the system, in order to determine end-to-end properties. Such a property applies to functional chains which describe the behaviour of sequences of tasks. We propose an approach to analyse worst case behaviour along functional chains in critical embedded systems. It is based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP) and is general in the sense that it can be applied to a variety of end-to-end properties. This paper focuses on two essential properties: end-to-end latency and temporal consistency. This work was supported by the French National Research Agency within the SATRIMMAP project