A new design of clock synchronization algorithm

The introduction of Ethernet makes the distributed network system more flexible and efficient, but it also makes nodes which are far apart from each other unable to work in the same time basis due to the long distance. This is not allowed for the high performance requirements of the system synchronization, such as high-precision multiaxis machining system. This paper presents a high-precision network clock synchronization algorithm, namely, optimal PI clock servo, which imposes a PI controller in order to compensate for the clock drift of each network node. Then a simulation platform established by the toolbox TrueTime is used to verify the stability of the algorithm and compare it with the clock synchronization algorithm of EtherCAT. The results show that the new synchronization algorithm has higher synchronization precision and faster convergence rate.