Extending IEEE 1588 to fault tolerant clock synchronization

Clock synchronization over packet-oriented networks is an enabling technology for many distributed applications especially in automation. To this end it is of great interest to obtain a worst-case bound on the deviation between the clocks of any two nodes, known as clock precision. This article describes the steps involved in order to achieve a higher precision over Ethernet-based LANs without degrading fault tolerance and determinism aspects. We explain how the statistical time synchronization in IEEE 1588 could be extended by a deterministic algorithm to support those features in an orthogonal fashion.