Byteflight
Byteflight is a protocol developed by BMW in cooperation with Motorola, Elmos and Infineon for safety-critical applications in automotive technology. The Byteflight system is used in BMW 7 series cars for the transmission of time-critical data of the airbag system in addition to those of the body electronics and the chassis.
Byteflight has a data rate of 10 Mbit/s and uses polymer optical fibers as the transmission medium. Byteflight is configured in star topology with an intelligent star coupler.
Besides the mentioned automotive technology, Byteflight can be used in all real-time applications with extremely short latency times and high data throughput. Likewise in environments with strong interference.
Like the CAN bus, Byteflight also works with a message-oriented transmission process. Where all messages are made available to all Bytefligt stations. The data frame of Byteflight is very similar to the CAN data frame, the maximum length of the data field is 12 bytes. In order to achieve predictable real-time behavior, Byteflight uses the deterministic access methodTDMA, where each connected bus station is provided with a time slot to transmit the data within a certain time.