Efficient AUTOSAR-Compliant CAN-FD Frame Packing with Observed Optimality

With the trend towards automated driving, Controller Area Network (CAN) is migrating to CAN with Flexible Data-Rate (CAN-FD), where frame packing (i.e., packing signals of various periods, deadlines, and payloads into frames following the standard CAN- FD format) is critical to address the high bandwidth demand with limited resources. Existing works have applied Integer Linear Programming (ILP), which easily gets intractable as the number of signals to be packed increases, or proposed heuristics, which are not able to obtain the optimal solution. In addition, the security model employed does not meet the AUTOSAR SecOC specification. This paper reports a novel frame packing approach for CAN-FD with an AUTOSAR-compliant security model. We establish the theory that extending the existing frame to pack signals with the same period leads to shorter WCTT (worst-case transmission time) and thus lower bus utilization compared to creating a new frame. Following this principle, the design space is tremendously pruned. As shown in the comprehensive experiments, only 10
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of the original size or even a smaller portion needs to be explored, while the optimality is kept. The computational time is correspondingly reduced, generating solutions within 15 minutes to large-scale problems that are otherwise intractable with ILP.