Predictable Timestamping for the Controller Area Network: Evaluation and Effect on Clock Synchronization Accuracy

Accurate timestamps are important for clock synchronization (CS) and cyber-security on the controller area network (CAN). This article proposes a new predictable timestamping (TS) method on CAN. Different from existing TS methods, our method reduces the effect of uncertainties that are caused by the CAN bit timing, oscillator drifts, and different cable lengths. Accordingly, our TS method provides an improved TS quality, which is confirmed in comprehensive hardware experiments. We further show the positive impact of our TS method on CS for CAN with clock accuracies below 100 ns.