The accuracy of IEEE 1588 time synchronization protocol and its improvement

Among the technologies of intelligent substation, the accuracy of time synchronization plays an important role in the information collecting, fault analyzing, detection controlling. The IEEE 1588 time synchronization protocol enables the accuracy of sub-microsecond, and plays an important role in the packet-based network synchronization mechanism, which becomes the ideal choice to realize the accurate network time synchronization of substation. In this paper, the realization mechanism of IEEE 1588 protocol is introduced first, and on that basis, the main accuracy influencing factors of the protocol are analyzed. Aiming at the influencing factors such as the time offset between master and slave clock, the network delay caused by the packet line up mechanism, the switch and generating position of time stamp, the specific methods to reduce or eliminate the influence and further improve the synchronization accuracy are proposed. The research results could provide theory references for the accuracy improving of IEEE 1588 time synchronization protocol.