Donald H. Lenhert

An Overview and Comparison of Time-Triggered Protocols For X-By-Wire Applications

A majority of today’s agricultural machinery uses CAN bus for on-board electronics communications. CAN is an event-triggered protocol, providing more flexibility but with less dependability. Fully autonomous vehicle operation requires X-By-Wire actuator interface and highly dependable data communication. Time triggered protocols provide more dependability and thus they are more appropriate for safety-related X-By-Wire applications. This paper overviews and compares three major time triggered protocols, TTCAN, TTP, and FlexRay, and discusses the influence of these protocols to future agricultural bus evolvement when more X-By-Wire systems are integrated with agricultural equipments.