Synchronization performance of the Precision Time Protocol in the face of slave clock frequency drift

This paper studies the performance of the precision time protocol (PTP) of the IEEE 1588 standard for drifting slave frequencies. The error expression for the master time estimate at the n^th slave is analytically derived and demonstrated in simulation runs. We show that single-slave frequency drift is very benign compared to master frequency drift, which is only matched by all slaves drifting.