Using Two Independent Channels With Gateway for FlexRay Static Segment Scheduling

The FlexRay bus is a communication standard used in the automotive industry. It offers a deterministic message transmission in the static segment following a time-triggered schedule. Even if its bandwidth is ten times higher than the bandwidth of controller area network (CAN), its throughput limits are going to be reached in high-class car models soon. A solution that could postpone this problem is to use an efficient scheduling algorithm that exploits both channels of the FlexRay. The significant and often neglected feature that can theoretically double the bandwidth is the possibility to use two independent communication channels that can intercommunicate through the gateway. In this paper, we propose a heuristic algorithm that decomposes the scheduling problem to the electronic control unit (ECU)-to-channel assignment subproblem, which decides which channel the ECUs should be connected to and the channel scheduling subproblem that creates static segment communication schedules for both channels. The algorithm is able to create a schedule for cases where channels are configured in the independent mode, as well as in the fault-tolerant mode or in cases where just part of the signals are fault tolerant. Finally, the algorithm is evaluated on real data and synthesized data, and the relation between the portion of fault-tolerant signals and the number of allocated slots is presented.