The advent of active-safety and safety-critical functions, including by-wire systems, and the interdependency of these functions is rapidly changing the scenario of automotive systems. OEMs need to understand and control functional and timing properties, including end-to-end latencies of distributed computations. The evaluation of the timing behavior can be very complex, considering the communication and synchronization model between application tasks, middleware, and network drivers, and the scheduling choices for tasks and messages. In this view, the timing behavior of CAN messages is of very high importance. In this paper we present some of the challenges in the evaluation of CAN message latencies.
