Fault Effects in FlexRay-Based Networks with Hybrid Topology

This paper investigates fault effects and error propagation in a FlexRay-based network with hybrid topology that includes a bus subnetwork and a star subnetwork. The investigation is based on about 43500 bit-flip fault injection inside different parts of the FlexRay communication controller. To do this, a FlexRay communication controller is modeled by Verilog HDL at the behavioral level. Then, this controller is exploited to setup a FlexRay-based network composed of eight nodes (four nodes in the bus subnetwork and four nodes in the star subnetwork). The faults are injected in a node of the bus subnetwork and a node of the star subnetwork of the hybrid network Then, the faults resulting in the three kinds of errors, namely, content errors, syntax errors and boundary violation errors are characterized. The results of fault injection show that boundary violation errors and content errors are negligibly propagated to the star subnetwork and syntax errors propagation is almost equal in the both bus and star subnetworks. Totally, the percentage of errors propagation in the bus subnetwork is more than the star subnetwork.