A High-Flexibility CAN-TSN Gateway With a Low-Congestion TSN-to-CAN Scheduler

The network architecture with the controller area network (CAN) as the domain bus in most domains and time-sensitive networking (TSN) as the backbone network is called the CAN-TSN interconnection network architecture, which has been or will be employed in industrial embedded networks (e.g., automobiles, spacecraft, and factory automation). In this architecture, the CAN-TSN gateway acts as a transmission hub handling a large number of communications between the CAN domains and TSN. However, most commercial CAN-TSN gateways are highly integrated with low flexibility, such that they are hard to accommodate different time planning mechanisms from TSN. In addition, these CAN-TSN gateways suffer from high congestion when TSN frames are sent from the TSN side to a CAN domain (i.e., TSN-to-CAN transmission) because of at least 100 times in the transmission rate between CAN and TSN. In this study, we propose a high-flexibility CAN-TSN gateway, where the CAN side can be easily adapted to different bus protocols, and the TSN side can be easily adapted to different configurations. In the gateway, we develop a low-congestion TSN-to-CAN scheduler, which executes a maximum awaiting time (MAT)-based scheduling strategy to alleviate the congestion. Experiments on the prototype platform show the advantages of the proposed CAN-TSN gateway and the developed MAT-based scheduling strategy.