Avoiding the babbling idiot failure in a communication system based on flexible time division multiple access: A bus guardian solution

In a safety-critical real time system it is important to prevent the babbling idiot failure (BIF), which is characterized by a faulty node transmitting arbitrary messages at random points in time. However, existing communication systems based on flexible time division multiple access (FTDMA), whose development was driven explicitly by the new needs of future in-car control applications involving safety-critical functions, do not provide any efficient solution to avoid the BIF. Therefore, a bus guardian (BG) solution is presented to avoid the BIF in a FTDMA based communication system in this paper. The supervision algorithm of the proposed BG is presented along with the node architecture necessary for implementing the presented technique. Results of performance evaluation show that the proposed BG can enforce the error containment in the time domain of FTDMA based systems and help to make them appropriate for safety-critical applications.