FPGA based nodes for sub-microsecond synchronization of cyber-physical production systems on high availability ring networks

Cyber-Physical Production Systems are characterized by integrating sensors, processing and communication in Industrial Environments like in advanced manufacturing plants or in the new generation Smart Grids. In these context, the accuracy on the synchronization plays a vital role because it is the base for control operations and for the correlation among the distributed sensor data sampling. In this paper the application of the IEEE1588 Synchronization protocol over High Availability Ethernet networks is applied to a new generation Cyber-Physical Production Systems in order to achieve sub-microsecond synchronization. These CPPS can be used to build rings and to interconnect rings as well. These interconnections offer bumpless Ethernet redundancy, without the need of any additional network equipment. In order to measure the resilience and the accuracy of the 1588-aware high-availability network composed by these nodes, a distributed sensors implementation composed by HSR network nodes that benefits from reconfigurable technology (small FPGAs and powerful programmable SoCs)has been analyzed. As it has been verified, although in a case of network failure, the synchronization recovers automatically and the accuracy obtained is in the range of 1 μs, that offers a very good reference for many applications in the industry.