A New Solution to Extend Controller Area Networks by Bridging Over ATM

Abstract

Controller Area Network (CAN) is a real-time serial communication bus initially introduced for automotive applications, and then widely used in industrial control environments such as industrial automation, and smart building management. With priority based bit-wise arbitration used in medium access control method, no time is wasted for collisions and the highest priority message is guaranteed to access the bus first. This provides a guaranteed low latency for real-time applications. On the other hand, since all the nodes have to observe each other's transmission level within a single bit-time, the bus has to be at a limited length at a given bit-rate. This paper introduces a new solution to extend CAN systems over an ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) backbone network by using remote bridging. Besides extending CAN, this method also provides an opportunity for CAN to incorporate with the future fast network technology of ATM.