As the capability of spacecraft microprocessorsincreases, there is a growing trend for distributing thespacecraft control applications amongst remoteterminals on the bus. This trend is seen both inpayloads and in the spacecraft sub-systems.On the one hand, there is an increase in the proportionof data packet traffic on the onboard bus. On the otherhand, as remote terminals become more “intelligent”,they expect better services from the onboard bus. Inparticular, they expect to be able to access the bus totransfer data packets on demand, and many modernsoftware architectures are based on messagingcapabilities, where applications communicate witheach other variable length messages that aregenerated asynchronously.The increasing “intelligence” in remote terminals,their demands for more comprehensive communicationservices, and the need to support multi-busheterogeneous architectures, result in an increased useof higher level protocols and services across multipleand different onboard buses.This paper presents the ongoing effort realised withinthe ECSS CAN working group on defining thenecessary services and associated data link protocolsto standardise the usage of CAN bus in spaceapplications.
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