A sub-microsecond clock synchronization protocol for wireless industrial monitoring and control networks

Wireless networks are getting more and more important to industrial process monitoring in control. One of the key challenges in these domains is clock synchronization. Needed to be able to link data gathered on different devices in the network. More recently the idea of wireless closed loop controllers rose. With that even more precise clock synchronization is needed. In this paper we propose a protocol capable of sub-microsecond synchronization and clock drift compensation. The proposed protocol is inspired by the widely used PTP but was optimized for wireless networks. Our real world evaluation indicates, that clock drift is a serious challenge in networks utilizing modern microcontrollers. We also show that our approach is capable of mitigating that drift to reach a competitive degree of synchronicity.