Enhancing White Rabbit Synchronization Stability and Scalability Using P2P Transparent and Hybrid Clocks

Abstract

Time synchronization faces an increasing performance demand nowadays. This is particularly common in different segments, such as new scientific infrastructures, power grid, telecommunications or fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks. All of them share the need for a time synchronization technology offering a very low synchronization error along large networks. The new version of the IEEE-1588-2019 protocol offers a considerable performance improvement thanks to the high accuracy profile based on white rabbit (WR). The original WR implementation guarantees a synchronization accuracy below 1 ns for a small number of cascaded nodes. This contribution evaluates the performance degradation when a considerable number of devices are deployed in cascaded configurations. In order to improve the performance, different delay measurement implementations have been evaluated in a series of experiments. The results prove the considerable benefits of our implementation against the current WR implementation.