Specification
The FlexRay Consortium provides technical and organisational information which can be easily obtained at the official website www.flexray.com. There, it is also possible to request the latest version of the FlexRay specification.
Primarily, the FlexRay specification states how a communication infrastructure for future generation high-speed control applications in vehicles can be established by providing a:
- Message exchange service providing deterministic cycle based message transport
- Synchronization service providing a common time base to all nodes
- Start-up service providing an autonomous start-up procedure
- Error management service providing error handling and error signalling
- Symbol service allowing the realization of a redundant communication path
- Wakeup service addressing the power management needs
The FlexRay protocol considers scalability to address techno-economical constraints and functional alternatives within one conceptual framework serving multiple application fields.
By providing a choice of network topologies (e.g., passive bus topology, active star topology, single-channel topologies, dual-channel topologies), communication modes and message exchange principles (repetitive message transfer, spontaneous message transfer), the FlexRay specification also addresses the problem of scalability and thus technical as well as economical constraints.
