A first design for CANsistant: A mechanism to prevent inconsistent omissions in CAN in the presence of multiple errors

Despite the significant advantages of the controller area network (CAN) there is an extended belief that CAN is not suitable for critical applications, mainly because of several dependability limitations. One of them is its limited data consistency. Several solutions to this problem have been previously proposed but they are not able to efficiently ensure consistent broadcasts in the presence of multiple channel errors. This paper introduces a circuit called CANsistant, that detects all scenarios potentially leading to the inconsistent omission of a frame in the presence of up to 4 channel errors and, if necessary, retransmits the affected frame.