High availability MilCAN

Modern vehicles incorporate an increasing number of electronic systems. These systems consist of multiple embedded devices in order to replace already existing mechanical or hydraulic solutions or introduce new functionalities. The demand of using electronic systems for the military land vehicles is continuously increasing and much higher than in the commercial sector. For these electronic devices to intercommunicate and provide the desired service, embedded networks have to be used. These networks need to be compliant to the minimum requirements set by their intended use. Some of these requirements are determinism, high bandwidth, flexibility, durability and cost. There are networks that provide some of the above mentioned characteristics, but rarely all of them. One solution for this is to improve an already existing embedded network to provide the extra desired functionality and also keep the system complexity minimal.Thisstudy represents an investigation to expand the functionalities to an existing military protocolby adding reconfiguration for Through Life Capability Management (TLCM) and fault-tolerant capabilities for high operational system availability. The network that isused for this research is MilCAN which is software based protocol based on CAN.MilCAN stands for Military CAN and is a deterministic data transfer protocolused in control systems. For this research MilCAN A is used which uses 29 bit Identifier and allows both periodic and event driven data to be transmitted. These extra functionalities need to be software based to provide flexibility and upgradability without hardware restrictions. The devices with the added capabilities need to be compatible with older devices,to provide the flexibility to the system designer to choose when he will use them. To verify the operation and performance of the added functionalities two testbeds have been developed, the first testbed is used for development and operation verification where the second testbed is used for operation verification and performance measurements while emulating the operation of a vehicle.