Analytical and Experimental Performance Evaluations of CAN-FD Bus

Controller area network (CAN) is a widely-used bus protocol in automotive distributed embedded systems, but its limited communication bandwidth (up to 1 Mbps) and payload size (up to 8 Bytes) limit its applicability in today's increasingly complex automotive electrical/electronic systems. CAN with flexible data rate (CAN-FD) is an improved CAN-based communication protocol, with higher communication bandwidth (up to 8 Mbps for the payload) and increased payload size (up to 64 Bytes). In this paper, we perform analytical and experimental performance comparisons of CAN-FD bus with conventional CAN bus. We consider a message set obtained by reverse-engineering a real CAN -based system, with additional high-priority interference messages for stress-testing the system with different bus loads. We also consider a networked control system based on the message set, and analyze the control system performance measured by step responses under different bus loads. Experimental results validate the performance advantages of CAN-FD over conventional CAN bus.