A Real-Time CAN-CAN Gateway with Tight Latency Analysis and Targeted Priority Assignment

There is a demand in the automotive industry to connect two CAN-based subsystems. The commercial CAN-CAN gateway supports basic message forwarding with no real-time behavior. To address this issue, a new gateway architecture is described, on which we present a novel worst-case latency analysis. Specifically, we bound the arrival of the messages at the gateway, which is then used by the Pointer Reachability Exploration (PRE) to derive the interfering message jobs. Our analysis computes a safe gateway latency tighter than the conventional one applied in CAN. Furthermore, we propose a Targeted Priority Assignment (TPA) algorithm that targets at the priorities assigned at the CAN bus and runs a reordering at the gateway to enhance the schedulability. TPA performs better than DMPO (Deadline Monotonic Priority Ordering), while OPA (Audsley's Optimal Priority Assignment) cannot be applied in this context. Evaluation over real-life and scalable CAN message sets is conducted. The reported analysis and priority assignment algorithm are developed for dynamic use to improve the acceptance ratio and can also be deployed statically to provide timing guarantees. This work can be easily extended to support multiple CAN subsystems.