A Fair Access Mechanism to Support Fragmented Data Transfers in CAN

Controller Area Network is still the most popular solution for in-vehicle communications in automotive scenarios. Recent solutions like CAN FD and CAN XL manage to reduce the performance gap with Ethernet-based solutions. Nevertheless, the priority-based access mechanism they rely on is not completely adequate to support fragmented transfers of large blocks of data, as happens, e.g., for driver assistance and the Internet of Things. In this paper, a slight modification is proposed for the basic CAN access mechanism that permits a group of objects to be served by the network with about the same quality of service. This provides fair treatment to a number of block transfers initiated by different nodes and taking place contextually over the bus.