Performance Enhancement of CAN/Ethernet Automotive Gateway with a CAN Data Reduction Algorithm

Abstract

Data reduction (DR) techniques for the controller area network (CAN) are being developed to reduce the increased bus load caused by the growing number of electronic control units (ECUs) and automotive software complexity in modern automobiles. DR techniques enable the transmission of the same information with less bandwidth, effectively reducing the busload in CAN-based networks. Modern vehicles are composed of various in-vehicle network (IVN) protocols, such as CAN, local interconnect network (LIN), and Ethernet. However, existing DR techniques only consider the communication between CAN nodes. The application of DR techniques to a CAN bus may lead to compatibility issues when communicating with heterogeneous IVN protocols. This paper proposed a CAN/Ethernet gateway system for seamless communication with CAN DR. The proposed gateway system was implemented on a TC275-based embedded system, and its performance was evaluated and analyzed. The experimental results revealed that CAN DR compression effectively improves both the CAN bus load and end-to-end processing time of the gateway system. The CAN bus load was reduced by up to 33.68%, and the average end-to-end processing time was reduced to 336 μs.