An Experimental Study of the FlexRay Dynamic Segment

It is expected that the time-triggered FlexRay bus will replace the event-triggered Controller Area Network (CAN) for the high-speed in-vehicle communication in future automobiles. To this end, FlexRay provides a static segment for the transmission of periodic messages and a dynamic segment that is suitable for exchanging event-based (sporadic) messages. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate the operation of the FlexRay dynamic segment. In particular, we study how the maximum and average message delays are affected if the length of the dynamic segment, the message payload, the utilization of the dynamic segment and the priority assignment changes. Our experiments are carried out on a FlexRay network with 6 nodes.