Real-Timeness Improvement of CAN-based Industrial Networks Based on Criticality Level

—Although applying new Internet-based communication technologies on industrial physical processes made great improvements in factory automation, there are still many challenges to meet the response time and reliability requirements of industrial communications. These challenges resulted from strict real-time requirements of industrial control system communications which are performed in harsh environments. The controller area network (CAN) communication protocol is commonly employed to deal with these challenges. However, in this protocol, even message retransmission requests of a faulty node can lead to timing failures. In this paper, to control the behavior of nodes, message retransmission is performed based on the criticality level of message reception. The proposed method, called MRMC+, improves the real-time behavior of a CAN bus in terms of response time by an average of 36.32% and 18.02%, respectively, compared to the standard CAN and WCTER-based approaches.