Study on a Dynamic master system for Controller Area Network

CAN(Controller Area Network) is a simple and efficient network system for real time control and measurement. As it is not only good at error detection but also strong in electromagnetic interference, CAN has been widely used all over the industries. Basically, CAN needs a master node in charge of sensor data collection, node scheduling for data transmission to a monitoring system and error detection. According to the number of mater nodes, the CAN system is classified into two type of master system. One is a single master system that has only one master node and the other is a multi-master system where any sensor node can become a master node depending on the system's conditions. While it has the advantage of its fault tolerance, the multi-master system will suffer form the overall performance degradation when a defect is found in the master node. It is because all sensor nodes pertaining to a defective master node lose their position. Moreover, it is difficult and expensive to implement. For a single master system, the whole system will be broken down when a problem happens to a single master. In this paper, a dynamic master system is presented that there are several sub-master nodes of which basic functions are those of other sensor nodes at ordinary times but dynamically changed to replace the failing master node. An effective scheduling algorithm is also proposed to choose an appropriate node among sub-master nodes, where each sub-master node has its precedence value. The performance of the dynamic master system is experimented and analyzed.