Analysis and Verification of Multi-hop Cumulative Time Synchronization Error in TSN Networks

As a deterministic network technology in Layer 2, time- sensitive networking (TSN) has good application prospects in many fields such as industrial automation and small grids. Time synchronization is the foundation of TSN and synchronization error has a significant impact on the performance of TSN. In this paper, we modeled and calculated the multi-hop cumulative synchronization error based on 802.1AS standard. We built a testing bed to obtain multiple sets of synchronization data by changing the number of switches in the network topology. We compared the theoretical calculation values with the actual test values. The test results verified the reliability of our model and illustrated the limitation of multi-hop cumulative synchronization error on large-scale TSN networks.