ABSTRACT
The goal of the 2001 founded FlexRay Consortium is to establish one standard for a high-performance communication technology in the automotive industry. A FlexRay network consists of a set of electronic control units (ECUs) with integrated communication controllers (CCs). Each CC connects the ECU to one or more communication channels via a communication port, which in turn links to a bus driver. FlexRay supports the operation of a CC with single or redundant communication channels. The media access strategy of FlexRay is basically a time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme with some very specific properties. The basic element of the TDMA scheme is a communication cycle. The media access scheme of FlexRay relies on a common and consistent view about time that is shared between all CCs in the network. It is the task of the clock synchronization service to generate such a time view locally inside each CC.
