Communication protocol evaluation for embedded systems

Modern automotive applications become more and more complex: they are implemented over distributed architectures that include several electronic control units (ECUs) communicating via a local communication network which is event triggered (e.g. CAN, controller area network) or time triggered (e.g. TTCAN, time triggered CAN). These ECUs exchange data or messages in two possible modes: push or pull. A key design issue of such embedded systems is to satisfy a number of QoS constraints such as real-time, dimension, fault tolerance, etc. In this paper, we present a formal evaluation of the communication protocols used in automotive applications (push/pull with CAN/TTCAN). The evaluation is done using three criteria: throughput (dimension constraint), error detection delay (fault tolerance constraint) and information transmission delay (real-time constraint). The objective of this work is to identify, for each communication protocol, different classes of application to help automotive system designers to choose the best protocol able to match the previous set of requirements.