IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY 1 Message Scheduling for the FlexRay Protocol: The Dynamic Segment

to be the de-facto standard for high-speed in-vehicle commu-nication. In this paper, we formally investigate the scheduling problem for the dynamic segment of FlexRay. We take the bounds on the generation times and the timing requirements of the signals into consideration to propose a reservation based scheduling approach that preserves the flexible medium access of the dynamic segment. In order to obtain efficient schedules, we formulate a nonlinear integer programming problem (NIP) that minimizes the required duration of the dynamic segment. This NIP is then decomposed into two linear binary integer programming problems to facilitate the computation of feasible message schedules. An experimental study illustrates our message scheduling approach for the dynamic segment of FlexRay. Index Terms—Vehicular communication networks, FlexRay, real-time, scheduling, integer programming I