A Quantitative Performance Study on CAN and CAN FD Vehicular Networks

The amount of electronic systems in agriculture machinery grows, becoming more complex and multifunctional. Due to the increasing number of devices connected to the network and the complexity of their functions, the current controller area network (CAN) becomes overloaded and CAN with flexible data rate (CAN FD) emerges as an alternative. This paper presents the simulation of an agriculture machine vehicular network using the higher layer protocols J1939 and ISO11783 (ISOBUS) and the performance comparison of the network using CAN, CAN FD 8 B and CAN FD 64 B. The presented contribution is mainly twofold: the proposal of an SAE J1939/ISOBUS compliant CAN FD 64 B model for a highly demanding vehicular network, and a detailed analysis of the real-time properties of this model compared to CAN and CAN FD 8 B. In the performed experiments, on the network permanent regime, periodic messages of machine control functions and network management data were sent by the devices connected to the network. The bus load usage, the response time, and jitter of these messages were analyzed to evaluate the real-time characteristics of the network. Compared to CAN, CAN FD had faster object pool transference, lower bus load usage, shorter worst case response time, and lower jitter.