Design and Performance Analysis of an Embedded CAN-Wi-Fi Gateway for Connected Vehicle Networks

Controller Area Network (CAN) is widely used in in-vehicle communication systems because of its reliability and robustness. However, conventional CAN networks are primarily designed for wired communication and do not directly support wireless access for local visualization, remote monitoring, or connected-vehicle services. This paper presents an embedded CAN–Wi-Fi gateway architecture for connected-vehicle monitoring applications. The proposed system integrates a CAN interface, an embedded gateway controller, a wireless communication module, a mobile human–machine interface (HMI), and an edge-server-based remote monitoring service. A modular hardware and software framework is developed to support CAN message acquisition, identifier-based filtering, priority classification, queue-based buffering, structured packet generation, wireless transmission, local visualization, and remote data access. To reduce unnecessary wireless traffic and improve the responsiveness of urgent monitoring traffic, the gateway selectively forwards monitoring-related CAN identifiers and applies strict-priority dispatch using separate High-, Medium-, and Low-priority queues. The system is verified using representative Saab P-bus-based vehicle data packets derived from publicly available reverse-engineering information. Controlled wireless experiments achieved 100% packet delivery under offered traffic rates of 20, 50, and 100 frames/s, with application-level throughput increasing from approximately 33.8 to 170.0 kbps and round-trip time (RTT)-based estimated one-way wireless delay ranging from approximately 4.1 to 10.8 ms. Under transient burst contention, priority-based dispatch reduced the mean High-priority warning-traffic queue waiting time from 31.116 ms with single-FIFO forwarding to 2.268 ms, reduced the P95 value from 53.560 to 4.808 ms, and reduced the 25 ms threshold-exceedance ratio from approximately 61.7% to 0%. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed CAN–Wi-Fi gateway for integrated local and remote vehicle monitoring and show that strict-priority dispatch can substantially improve the responsiveness of urgent monitoring traffic under temporary gateway contention.