Real-time guarantees for CAN traffic

Modern cars comprise a multitude of electronic features which are implemented in tens of communicating control units. To connect these in-car embedded systems, the CAN bus offers a sustainable performance, hence it is used as a widespread communication infrastructure, even for safety critical applications. However, CAN media access is priority based and performed competitive and non-preemptive. Thus, assessing the worst case end-to-end delay is inevitable in order to provide safe and efficient operation of functions with hard real-time properties. In this paper, we use the analytical method of Network Calculus to determine guaranteed upper bounds for transmission delays of all CAN priorities. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by investigating current real-life CAN communication data from the German car manufacturer Audi.