Enhancing real-time CAN communications by the prioritization of urgent messages at the outgoing queue

To ensure the correct behaviour of a Networked Control System, the communication network mustprovide a reliable and timely communication service. The two components with the highest impact on thecommunication delays are the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol and the local communication stack,therefore, the usage of an adequate communication stack is of utmost importance to guarantee the timingcorrectness of a feedback control application.In this paper, we propose the use of state-of-the-art scheduling algorithms to manage the outgoing queue of alocal communication stack. We demonstrate that it is possible to improve the responsiveness of applicationssupported by the CAN communication protocol, by using just a light scheduling middleware to adequatelyschedule the outgoing queue. We also show that implementing such middleware even on top of COTScommunication hardware, opens the possibility to enhance the communication process by minimizing thenumber of deadline misses for highly loaded network scenarios