CAN Protocol

Frame Format
Defines both a standard and an extended frame format
They differ in the size of the identifier field and for some
other bits in the arbitration field
Standard frame format also know as CAN 2.0A format
defines an 11 bit identifier field, means upto 2048
different identifiers are available to applications running
in the same network
Extended frame format CAN 2.0B assigns 29 bits to
the identifier- upto half a billion different objects could
exist in the same network

Data Frame
Data frames are used to send information over the network
Each data frame begins with an SOF bit at the dominant level- its
role is to mark the beginning of the frame. SOF bit is also used to
synchronize the receiving nodes
After SOF bit the arbitration field follows, includes identifier field and
remote transmission request (RTR) bit
Identifier field identifies the content of the frame, also used by the
MAC layer to detect and manage the priority of the frame, used
when collision occurs
The RTR bit used to discriminate between data and remote frames
RTR bit = 0 data frame , =1 remote frame
A data frame has a higher priority than a remote frame having the
same identifier


Next to the arbitration field comes the control field
In the case of the base frames, control field includes IDE
bit, reserved bit r0
In extended frame- IDE bit belong to the arbitration field
as well as substitute remote request (SRR) bit a
placeholder that is sent at recessive value to preserve
the structure of the frames
In this case IDE bit is followed by the identifier extension
and then by control field
Control field starts with r0 and r1-reserved bits, followed
by data length code (DLC)- it specifies the length of the
data field


Size of the data field is 8bytes
For the DLC field values ranging from 0 to 8 are allowed
Higher values (9 to 15) can be used for application
specific purpose
The CRC and the acknowledgement fields are placed
after the data field
The frame is closed by the end of the frame (EOF) field,
made up of 7 recessive bits
Different frames are interleaved by the intermission
(IMS) gap, which consists of 3 recessive bits and
effectively separates consecutive frames exchanged on
the bus


Remote Frames
They are very similar to data frames
The only difference is that they carry no data
They are used to request that a given message be sent on the
network by a remote node
Requesting node does not know who is the sender, it is upto the
receiver to discover the one that has to reply
The DLC field in the remote frame is not used by the CAN protocol
Error and Overload frames
They are used to notify nodes in the network that an error has
occurred
They consists of 2 fields error flag and error delimiter
Two kinds of error flags:
Active error flags 6 dominant bits
Passive error flags 6 recessive bits
An active error flag violates the bit stuffing rules hence it enforces an
error condition, starts transmitting an error flag on its own
In this way there can be from 6 to 12 dominant bits on the bus as a
consequence of the transmission of an error flag
Error delimiter is made up of 8 recessive bits


Medium access technique
The MAC mechanism which CAN relies is basically the CSMA
scheme
When no frame is being exchanged, the network is idle and the level
on the bus is recessive
Before transmitting a frame, nodes have to sense the state of the
network if idle send otherwise wait until the end of the current
frame transmission
Although a very unlikely event, two or more nodes might start
sending their frames exactly at the same time
CAN is able to resolve contentions in a deterministic way, so that
neither time nor bandwidth is wasted
Therefore congestion conditions can no longer occur and all
theoretical system bandwidth is effectively available for
communications
Bus arbitration
The most distinctive feature of the medium access technique of CAN
is the ability to resolve any collision that may occur on the bus in a
deterministic way
This is made possible by the arbitration mechanism, which
effectively finds out the most urgent frame each time there is a
contention for the bus
The CAN arbitration scheme collision is resolved by stopping
transmission of frames involved except the one which is assigned
the highest priority
The arbitration technique exploits the peculiarity of the physical layer
of CAN, which conceptually provides a wired and connection
scheme among all nodes
When transmitting, each node compares the level sensed on the
bus to the value of the bit which is being written out. If the node is
transmitting a 1 and the level on the bus is 0, the node understands
that it has lost the contention and withdraws immediately and sets its
output port to 1, to read the incoming frames
The binary count down technique ensures that, in the
case of a collision, all nodes that are sending lower
priority frames will abort their transmission, except for
the one which is sending the frame with the highest
priority
This implies that no two nodes in a CAN network can
transmit message at the same time characterized by the
same identifier
If this is not the case, unmanageable collisions could
take place which causes transmission errors
Because of the automatic retransmission feature of CAN
controllers, this would lead to almost certainly to a burst
of errors on the bus, which in turn causes the nodes
involved to be disconnected by the fault confinement
mechanism. This implies that in general only one node
can be the producer of each object

Error management
Highly robust communication system
A system which is able to detect most
transmission errors