A Novel Method for Providing Precise Time Synchronization in a Distributed Control System Using Boundary Clock

We propose and demonstrate a method to provide precise time synchronization in distributed control systems using a boundary clock scheme. The major drawback of the boundary clock scheme is the exponential accumulation of time synchronization error as the number of hops increases. To make the error accumulation linearly increase with the number of hops, we first separate the frequency compensation interval (FCI) and the offset and frequency compensation interval (OFCI) and then separately optimize each interval. To demonstrate the performance of this method, we implemented test benches using Ethernet-linked distributed control systems. We measured the peak-to-peak jitter performance along with the maximum time interval error to assess the short- and long-term stability after several hops in distributed control systems. Our method enables the peak-to-peak jitter to be maintained under 107 ns after seven hops. The experimental results show that the performance of time synchronization is dominated by fast jitter rather than frequency error and wander, and the proposed scheme can be used to improve the time synchronization performance in IEEE 1588-compliant control systems using boundary clock.