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Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is the most promising time-deterministic wired communication approach for industrial applications. To extend TSN to "IEEE 802.11" wireless networks two challenging problems must be solved: synchronization and scheduling. This paper is focused on the first one. Even though a few solutions already meet the required synchronization accuracies, they are built on expensive hardware that is not suited for mass market products. While next Wi-Fi generation might support the required functionalities, this paper proposes a novel method that makes possible high-precision wireless synchronization using commercial low-cost components. With the proposed solution, a standard deviation of synchronization error of less than 500 ns can be achieved for many use cases and system loads on both CPU and network. This performance is comparable to modern wired real-time field busses, which makes the developed method a significant contribution for the extension of the TSN protocol to the wireless domain.
Wireless synchronization of industrial controllers is a challenging task in environments where wired solutions are not practical. The best solutions proposed so far to solve this problem require pretty expensive and highly specialized FPGA-based devices. With this work we counter the trend by introducing a straightforward approach to synchronize a fairly cheap IEEE 802.11 integrated wireless chip (IWC) with external devices. More specifically we demonstrate how we can reprogram the software running in the 802.11 IWC of the Raspberry Pi 3B and transform the receiver input potential of the wireless transceiver into a triggering signal for an external inexpensive FPGA. Experimental results show a mean-square synchronization error of less than 496 ns, while the absolute synchronization error does not exceed 6 μs. The jitter of the output signal that we obtain after synchronizing the clock of the external device did not exceed 5.2 μs throughout the whole measurement campaign. Even though we do not score new records in term of accuracy, we do in terms of complexity, cost, and availability of the required components: all these factors make the proposed technique a very promising of the deployment of large-scale low-cost automation solutions.