DETIController Area Network (CAN) is a popular and very well-known bus system, both in
academia and in industry, initially targeted to automotive applications as a single
digital bus to replace the wiring that were growing complexity, weight and cost with
the advent of new automotive appliances. However, requirements have evolved and
CAN’s dependability and bandwidth limitations led to the emergence of alternative
networks such as FlexRay and TTP/C. Nevertheless, we believe that it is possible to
improve CAN so it could fulfill contemporary requirements. This paper proposes the
use of Flexible Time-Triggered CAN (FTT-CAN) to increase the available bandwidth
while providing fault tolerance in CAN based systems with multiple buses. The
architecture and flexibility of FTT based systems enables a tight yet flexible control of
redundancy and bandwidth usage without increasing the complexity of the nodes. In
this novel solution, a FTT-CAN Master controls the dispatching of messages among a
set of independent buses. The Master can react online to bus failures switching the
transmission of critical messages to a non-faulty bus, always keeping a predetermined
redundancy level
