Evaluation of Timing Characteristics of Industrial Ethernet Networks Synchronized by means of IEEE 1588

This paper deals with time synchronization of distributed systems over Industrial Ethernet network. A new simulation model of IEEE1588 PTP is presented and discussed. The development platform used for simulation is OPNET^™. Architecture of the proposed model is explained in details, highlighting some special features introduced by authors: modelization of drift and rate variations in the local oscillator and packet timestamping at any level of the protocol stack. Three typical industrial application scenarios have been simulated using the proposed model. Effects of bandwidth usage and network topology have been studied and results are reported. For instance, standard deviation of time offset in the order of 5 μs can be obtained in networks with 48 nodes and cycle time of 1 ms.