A low-overhead wireless TSN clock synchronization method based on beacon

With the improvement of the intelligent level of the manufacturing industry, the industrial control field has higher and higher requirements for real-time communication, low-cost deployment and flexible networking, which promotes the development of Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) to the field of wireless communication. The IEEE802.11 standard is the most widely used wireless communication protocol, but due to its definition of Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoid (CSMA/CA), there are random backoffs and poor real-time performance. Due to its characteristics, TSN cannot be directly applied to wireless networks. The primary task of establishing a wireless TSN is to achieve end-to-end clock synchronization. Aiming at the lack of support for upper-layer synchronization by IEEE802.11's own synchronization mechanism, this paper proposes a beacon frame-based clock synchronization method for wireless network communication. Compared with mainstream clock synchronization mechanisms such as Precision Time Protocol (PTP), this mechanism makes reasonable use of the beacon traffic in the wireless channel and significantly reduces the network overhead required for synchronization. The comparison experiment between this synchronization mechanism and PTP was done on the openwifi platform. The results show that this synchronization method can achieve the same order of μs-level synchronization accuracy as PTP at a much lower network overhead than PTP. This is in order to extend TSN to wireless networks. Lay the foundation.