A CONTROLLER AREA NETWORK LAYER FOR RECONFIGURABLE EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Abstract

Dependable and Fault-tolerant computing is actively being pursued as a research area since the 1980s in various fields involving development of safety-critical applications. The ability of the system to provide reliable functional service as per its design is a key paradigm in dependable computing. For providing reliable service in fault-tolerant systems, dynamic reconfiguration has to be supported to enable recovery from errors (induced by faults) or graceful degradation in case of service failures. Reconfigurable Distributed applications provided a platform to develop fault-tolerant systems and these reconfigurable architectures requires an embedded network that is inherently fault-tolerant and capable of handling movement of tasks between nodes/processors within the system during dynamic reconfiguration. The embedded network should provide mechanisms for deterministic message transfer under faulty environments and support fault detection/isolation mechanisms within the network framework. This thesis describes the design, implementation and validation of an embedded networking layer using Controller Area Network (CAN) to support reconfigurable embedded systems