Mixed time synchronization method for industrial Wireless Control Networks

Time synchronization plays an important role in Industrial Wireless Control Networks (IWCNs). To meet the demand for IWCNs, this paper presents a novel mixed time synchronization method, which combines the characteristics of the centralized time synchronization methods and the distributed time synchronization methods. The method could synchronize the network nodes to a given time source. And the models of logical clock and hardware clock have been built. At first, according to the maximum consensus theory, it realizes the synchronization of the logical time between the neighbor nodes. Then based on the revised information of logical clock, which is from the source node, ordinary nodes achieve synchronization with the hardware time of the source node. Simulation results show that the proposed method yields a faster convergence rate and higher synchronization precision in comparison to existing works.