A Practical Implementation of IEEE 1588-2008 Transparent Clock for Distributed Measurement and Control Systems

This paper addresses issues with time synchronization using the IEEE 1588-2008 for distributed measurement and control systems. A practical implementation of the transparent clock is presented with the overall system architecture and detailed operation of each building block. To verify the submicrosecond accuracy using the implemented devices, an experimental setup that was analogous to a practical distributed system has been built. Measured results from the experiment show that the time error is limited below 30 ns for nodes that were connected by three switches. It is remarkable that the results are observed in spite of large packet queuing delays that were introduced by a traffic generator. The discussion on sources of time error that was outlined here provides technical considerations to designing IEEE 1588 systems.