Enhancements to the time synchronization standard IEEE-1588 for a system of cascaded bridges

TLDR: In this paper, a bypass clock instead of the boundary clock is proposed as an enhancement of the IEEE-1588 standard for bridged networks, where the local clock adjustment can be modeled by a corresponding control loop.

Abstract: The IEEE-1588 standard for a high precision time synchronization now exists since 2002. For using this standard in bridged networks a so-called boundary clock is defined, where the local clock adjustment can be modeled by a corresponding control loop. At the field level of industrial automation systems, the line topology is very important. By using Ethernet at the field level, the resulting chain of bridges leads to a cascade of control loops and may lead to instabilities and deviations of the distributed clocks, which are not acceptable. For this application a bypass clock instead of the boundary clock is proposed as an enhancement of the IEEE-1588 standard. The effectiveness of this extension to be evaluated by simulation technique.