CAN Bus

The communication in the Concept Car is implemented via a high-speed (1Mbit/s) CAN-Bus (Controller-area network), featuring a message based protocol. Each message has a message identifier to distinguish between different message types. CAN standard 2.0A is applied, so the message identifiers are 11 bits wide, allowing 2048 distinct messages. Further details about the CAN-Bus can be found in [ZS08].

In the ConceptCar, only messages with the length of 4 Bytes, which are interpreted as an unsigned integer number, are used. How the message data has to be interpreted depends only on the message identifier, further details are given in Section ECUs Implementing Sensorboards and Actorboards, when the bus participant providing these messages is introduced.

A complete description of all messages being transmitted via CAN Bus in the Concept Car and the semantics and IDs of each message is presented in CAN IDs.