Performance evaluation of the distributed implementation of a car suspension system

In a wide category of embedded systems, sensors, controllers and actuators are located in distant locations. To ensure the control functions, these components need to be interconnected. Usually, communication networks are chosen to support the required communication exchange. In the context of the automotive industry, the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is yidely used because of its interesting properties. In theory, a CAN network can ensure real-time communications, when no transmission errors are detected. However, an incrpasing numher of applications are sharing this hus, generating jitter and delays on the exchanged messages, which can degrade the performance of control applications. In this paper, the distributed implementation of an active suspension controller is modelled in Simulink thanks to the use of the tool box TRUETIME. The network traffic is generated using the well-known SAE benchmark. Using this simulation model, the control performance of the active suspension system is studied as a function of the available network bandwidth