Achieving fault-tolerant ordered broadcasts in CAN

The paper focuses on the problem to guarantee reliable and ordered message delivery to the operational sites of a CAN-Bus network. The contributions of the paper are firstly a hardware mechanism to handle rare failure situations and secondly, a protocol to guarantee the same order of messages on all nodes. After analyzing the error handling mechanism, we suggest a hardware extension to capture situations, which may lead to inconsistent views about the status of a message between the nodes. Based on this mechanism, which enhances the guarantees of the CAN-Bus with respect to reliable message transmission, we develop a deadline-based total ordering scheme. By carefully exploiting the properties of CAN, this can be achieved with very low additional message overhead.