Performance comparison of mechanisms to reduce bit stuffing jitters in controller area networks

Bit stuffing in CAN is likely to cause jitters on message reception that, in specific cases where timing accuracy is relevant, may worsen the quality of the control algorithm noticeably. Several solutions have appeared in the past years that are aimed to tackle this issue, which are based on a suitable encoding of the payload of the message carried out in s/w by the transmitting node. In this paper, two efficient approaches are considered, namely XOR masking and 8B9B encoding, and their performance evaluated by means of both theoretical analysis and experimental campaigns. In particular, jitter reduction capability and encoding efficiency were taken into account and compared to the case when plain CAN is adopted.