EFT Fault Impact Analysis on Performance of Critical Tasks in Intravehicular Networks

Electrical fast transients (EFT) represent an important problem to intravehicular networks. Concerning this problem, this paper reports a study about the impact of EFT to the performance of communication protocols used in intravehicular networks. A method of fast transient injection has been applied to an experimental CAN network with the objective of verifying the EFT impact on jitter and how it influences the communication process. An experiment with a simulated control system distributed over a real CAN network was carried out. For this experiment, an active suspension system was chosen as a case study and a sequence of EFT injections was performed. As a result, it was verified that injected EFT bursts increase jitter of safety-critical control messages and may effectively influence and produce faults during the communication process.