Implementing Time-triggered Communication for Embedded Ethernet Real-time Network using IEEE 1588 Time Synchronization

Abstract

A time-triggered embedded system has become a ubiquitous technique in safety-critical systems, such as automotive, aerospace, and medical sectors. Thus, precision is of utmost importance to determine if the application is synchronized correctly. The Network Time Protocol is the traditional protocol used for clock synchronization in wired networks. On the other hand, the protocol lacks hardware timestamping features, and it collects many timestamping errors because of the diversification of the queuing time in the switches and router. This drawback was implemented into a new protocol, and new features on the Precision Time Protocol, known as IEEE 1588-2008, were added. This paper proposes a real-time network for a time-triggered Embedded system, the Precision Time Protocol synchronize, on a Spartan 3E Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Two approaches were also introduced to evaluate the performance using Precision Time Protocol: hardware and software implementations. MATLAB Simulink software was used to evaluate the software approaches. The result showed that the Precision Time Protocol used 0.83μs to complete the clock synchronization compared to the 4.65μs used by the Network Time Protocol, which was six times faster.