An Integrated Framework for Packing CAN-FD Frames and Assigning Offsets

Controller Area Network (CAN) is the most widely used in-vehicle network for communication among electronic control units (ECUs). To overcome the bandwidth limitation of standard CAN, CAN with flexible data rate (CAN FD) has been proposed. However, packing CAN FD frame with minimum bandwidth utilization and meeting real-time requirement simultaneously is a challenge. Previous research revealed that packing frames with minimized bandwidth utilization may violate frames' deadlines. To mitigate this issue, we proposed an integrated framework for packing frames to reduce the bandwidth utilization and improve the schedulability of packed frames simultaneously. The framework first employs an existing genetic algorithm (GA) for packing signals for each ECU separately, and then assigning offsets for packed frames in all ECUs together. Intensive experiments on randomly generated signal sets demonstrated that the proposed framework can achieve higher schedulability while maintaining the minimum bandwidth utilization comparing with the state-of-the-art methods.