A wireless transceiver for Control Area Networks: proof-of-concept implementation

The Control Area Network (CAN) standard is a communication standard for cabled bus networks that is widely used in industrial environments. The CAN protocol implements the Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Non Destructive Arbitration (CSMA/NDA) protocol for medium access control. Since CSMA/NDA requires full-duplex transceivers, it was widely believed that CAN communications could not be implemented with wireless transceivers. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to implement the CSMA/NDA protocol using On-Off Keying (OOK) modulation. We realize a proof-of-concept implementation using off-the-shelf wireless OOK transceivers, and show that our wireless transceivers are fully compatible with CAN controllers available on most micro-controller systems.