Enforcing Fail-Silence in the Entire FlexRay Communication Cycle

It is desirable that the nodes exhibit fail-silent behavior when designing distributed fault-tolerant systems. Bus Guardian (BG) is adopted to enforce the fail silence property of the node in the FlexRay communication system. However, the BG is effective only in the static segment while in the dynamic segment it does not provide any protection. Therefore, a novel BG is proposed in this paper. The mechanisms of the novel BG are presented along with the node architecture necessary for implementing the presented technique. Mathematical analysis results show that the novel BG can effectively enforce fail silence property in the entire FlexRay communication cycle.