Clock Synchronization for the Controller Area Network using Bit Timing Information

Mission-critical distributed automotive applications that communicate on the controller area network (CAN) require synchronized clocks in order to coordinate their actions. Therefore, this paper proposes an original precise clock synchronization method with drift correction for CAN. Different from existing methods that use timestamps, our method is based on the internal bit timing of CAN. The proposed method is implemented and evaluated in software without the need for hardware development thanks to a software-defined CAN controller. The experiments show that the new method surpasses existing methods by achieving clock accuracy below 10 us.