An Improved Network Time Protocol for Industrial Internet of Things†

Abstract

In the industrial Internet of Things, the network time protocol (NTP) can be used for time synchronization, allowing machines to run in sync so that machines can take critical actions within 1 ms. However, the commonly used NTP mechanism does not take into account that the network packet travel time over a link is time-varying, which causes the NTP to make incorrect synchronization decisions. Therefore, this paper proposed a low-cost modification to NTP with clock skew compensation and adaptive clock adjustment, so that the clock difference between the NTP client and NTP server can be controlled within 1 ms in the wired network environment. The adaptive clock adjustment skips the clock offset calculation when the NTP packet run trip time (RTT) exceeds a certain threshold. The clock skew compensation addresses the inherent issue that different clocks (or oscillators) naturally drift away from each other. Both adaptive clock adjustment and clock skew compensation are environment dependent and device dependent. The measurement result in our experimental environment shows that the when the RTT threshold is set at 1.7 ms, the best synchronization accuracy is achieved.