A fault-tolerant communication architecture for real-time control systems

Modern distributed computer control systems have to provide both highly reliable and hard real-time communication. To meet these requirements, a communication protocol adapted to the characteristics of data to be transferred has to be chosen. Concerning high reliability, additional measures have to be taken, since current protocols of the field-bus domain do not provide sufficient fault tolerance capabilities, especially with regard to fault detection and redundancy management. The article introduces a system architecture and fault-tolerant protocol mechanisms based on the communication protocol CAN. The system is suitable for large-scale control systems, which have to cope with both periodically and spontaneously occurring data.