Safe Fault-tolerant Clock Synchronization for Controller Area Network

Fault-tolerant clock synchronization (FTCS) methods for the Controller Area Network (CAN) enable accurately synchronized clocks of distributed CAN nodes even in case of node failures. Nonetheless, such methods still cannot support highly safety-critical applications since they are susceptible to faults on the CAN bus such as bit errors. This paper develops a novel safe FTCS method for CAN that enables FTCS and complies with automotive safety integrity level (ASIL) D. The practicability of our method with a clock accuracy below 2 μs is demonstrated in hardware experiments with fault injection.