Performance enhancement of the controller area network protocol using Reed-Solomon codes

Controller area network is a shared serial bus communication that is widely used in automotive and industrial networks. The CAN bus is considerably affected by the conducted electromagnetic interference, which is generated from many disturbances such as load dumb and ignition system noise. The EMI reduces the bus efficiency by introducing bit errors in the data frame. In this paper, the effect of the conducted EMI in automotives is comprehensively studied. Reed-Solomon encoding technique is proposed to combat the burst bit errors encountered in CAN. This solution is evaluated for different burst error lengths within the MATLAB environment, where the standard of 64-bit user message is used. Moreover, the influence of the position of the burst errors is explored. The obtained results showed considerable enhancement in the CAN bus performance when the RS code was integrated beside the automatic repeat request, which has been implemented within the CAN protocol. Implementing RS-20/CRC in the CAN bus system has corrected all the corrupted frames when burst errors occurred, specifically in the data block for burst lengths shorter than 11 bits. For the burst lengths greater than 11 bits, the RS-20/CRC scheme required up to 19% frame retransmissions. When implementing RS-40/CRC, all the frames were received correctly, i.e., 0% frame retransmissions were required by the CAN bus.