MilCAN and Ethernet

This paper aims to give a general description of a Bridge designed to transparently interconnect a cloud of MilCAN [1] segments using a high-speed backbone such as Ethernet. MilCAN is a protocol developed under the auspices of the International High Speed Data Bus Users group in order to cover the requirements for military Vetronics systems, providing deterministic and redundant communication between MilCAN nodes. With the constant increase of embedded devices within a vehicle the need for interconnection clashes with the speed limits of available backbone protocols. The VSI-Bridge is a software-based Bridge with routing capabilities (BRouter) developed to connect a MilCAN segment to high-speed complex protocols used as backbones. The target was to offload non-critical traffic from the embedded network to the backbone, thus reducing the load.