Hardware-Based Precise Time Synchronization on Gb/s Ethernet Enhanced with Preemptive Priority

Yoshiaki YAMADA
Satoru OHTA
Hitoshi UEMATSU

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E89-B    No.3    pp.683-689
Publication Date: 2006/03/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1093/ietcom/e89-b.3.683
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on the Next Generation Ethernet Technologies)
Category: 
Keyword: 
Ethernet,  synchronization,  delay variation,  priority,  QoS,  

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Summary: 
Time synchronization is indispensable for wide area distributed systems including sensor networks, automation systems, and measurement/control systems. Another application is clock distribution, which is indispensable to support continuous information transfer. Because of the increasing demand for more sophisticated applications, it is essential to establish a time synchronization technique that offers higher accuracy and reliability. Particularly, the accuracy of time synchronization for Ethernet must be enhanced since Ethernet is becoming more important in telecommunication networks. This paper investigates a precise time synchronization technique that supports Gb/s Ethernet. To obtain accurate time synchronization, delay variation in message transfer and processing must be minimized. For this purpose, the paper first describes the implementation of preemptive priority queuing, which decreases the message delay variation of Ethernet. Through experiments, it is shown that preemptive priority queuing effectively achieves very low delay variation. The paper then proposes a method to synchronize the time signal of a slave node to that of the master node. The proposed time synchronization method is performed in the lower protocol layer and implemented on FPGA-based hardware. The method achieves superior time accuracy through the low message transfer/processing delay variation provided by preemptive priority, lower layer execution, and hardware implementation. The effectiveness of the method is confirmed through experiments. The experiments show that the time variation achieved by the method is smaller than 0.1 µsec. This performance is better than those obtained by existing synchronization methods.