Achieving a Cost Efficient and Dependability Scalable System for Automotive Applications, Using the QRcontrol Communication Protocol

This paper presents methods to easily increase the dependability and fault tolerance of a scalable bit-oriented cyclic protocol, QRcontrol, utilizing TDMA technique. Minor changes to the protocol software and built-in techniques in the controller can give increased dependability for changing requirements on the system. These techniques include for example enabling of double buses, checksums for a node or a whole TDMA cycle, bus guardians and different fault detection mechanisms for some or all nodes in the cluster.

The concept can be assigned to a very broad range of applications, from body electronics in cars to “By-Wire” applications with the highest dependability requirements.