ABSTRACT
Since suppliers were the founding members of the FlexRay Consortium, it was clear from the very beginning of the work on the new de facto communication standard that FlexRay has to meet the requirements of the automotive industry. In order to create the migration path as smooth and efficient as possible, FlexRay has integrated some key qualities of existing communication technologies, for example, dynamic communication. Communication determinism and reuse are key enablers for scalability, which obviously is cost-driven requirement. A FlexRay network consists of a set of electronic control units (ECUs) with integrated communication controllers (CCs). The media access strategy of FlexRay is basically a time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme with some very specific properties. The standard software components and their standardized services must be complemented by standardized interfaces, through which the application software can access these services.
