Initial synchronization of TDMA communication in distributed real-time systems

This paper discusses the startup phase of a TDMA protocol intended for safety-critical real-time systems using a broadcast bus. The protocol contains sender id in each message, and nodes send messages of equal size in a fixed order. A single channel media is used and data and synchronization information must therefore share the same channel. Synchronization is challenging, since clocks must be synchronized to guarantee successful transmissions, and successful transmissions rely on synchronized clocks. We describe three different start-up algorithms and evaluate them with respect to complexity, resynchronization time and performance in the presence of transient faults.