Patent ID: 7787488

Claim:
An internal communication system adapted for communicatively coupling a plurality of nodes during a cycle, wherein the cycle presents a cycle length and a plurality of static temporal slots, and optimizing a schedule of time-triggered internodal messages and the cycle length, said system comprising: at least one host electronic-control-unit (ECU); and at least one channel communicatively interconnecting the nodes and ECU, said ECU and channel being cooperatively configured to transmit the messages to and from at least a portion of the nodes within the static slots, wherein each node is individually assigned to at least one slot, during the cycle, and a static segment, and number of unused slots is presented, said ECU being programmably configured to autonomously determine an optimal schedule for transmitting the plurality of messages within the static slots, and an optimal cycle length, wherein the number of unused slots is maximized, said ECU being further configured to fragment at least a portion of the messages into a plurality of signals prior to optimization, and defragment the signals, so as to reconstitute the original messages after optimization, said ECU being further configured to determine for each signal (s ij ) an originating node, a size in bytes, a period in microseconds (T ij ), and a transmission window, including start and end times (ws ij , we ij ), such that 0≦ws ij ≦we ij ≦T ij , wherein i represents the node number and j represents the signal number.