RTaW-Sim is a fine-grained discrete-event Controller Area Network (CAN) simulator providing the frame response time distributions and statistics about the frame buffer usage at the microcontroller and communication controller level. RTaW-Sim helps the designer choose the right communication stacks (e.g., waiting queue policy) and communication controllers (e.g., number of buffers), and configure them. RTaW-Sim enables the designer to perform Simulation Based Fault Injection (SBFI), for instance analyzing the effects of clock drifts or the impact of transmission errors on transmission latencies.
The download offers four tutorials that allow to quickly get an insight into the kind of analysis that the tool allows to perform. It also provides a reference manual that describes all the functionalities offered by RTaW-Sim. There is a reference manual of the underlying data model. And finally, it explains the basic functioning scheme of the simulation model underlying RTaW-Sim.
The goal of the documentation is to allow you to get quickly an idea about the kind of investigations RTaW-Sim allows to conduct on CAN based communication Systems. It shows how to obtain statistics about the response times of CAN frames (i.e., the time between a frame is ready to be sent and the time it is received by all stations) and it is dedicated to the exploration of the simulation results. It analyzes respectively the effects of clock-drifts and transmission errors on response time maxima of CAN frames.
The evaluation of frame response times is the most basic feature of a CAN simulator and probably the most useful because having a precise idea of the frame response times on a CAN bus is difficult without a tool, as soon as there are more than a few frames. It should be pointed out that if the microcontroller clocks that drives the transmission are assumed to not drift apart, provided periodic transmissions, then the response times statistics converges very soon (basically two lcm of the frames periods is enough) and it is not needed to simulate for a longer duration. Of course, as soon the microcontroller clocks may have drifts, as it occurs in practice, then it is less obvious to know how long is enough but RTaW-Sim helps you in that regard with the possibility to visualy check the convergence of statistics.
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