In-Vehicle Communication Network Modeling and Simulation Environment - A Tool to Study the Vehicle Network Architecture and Vehicle EE System Architecture

A methodology of modeling and simulating a whole vehicle CAN network will be presented in this article. Concentrating on the distributed characteristics of the in-vehicle communication network, this methodology not only provides all detailed information on traditional communication parameters such as communication bus bandwidth, message latency time, bus arbitration behavior and so on, but also provides detailed information for each node in the communication network. The detailed information on each node includes the behaviors of hardware (in terms of delay time), CPU performance (in terms of band width and throughput), and software tasks (in terms of execution time and deployed operation system). All these dynamic linked behaviors of each node and behaviors of network give engineers a deeper understanding of their network communication strategy and system impact of chosen hardware and software implementations.