Performance Enhancement for the FPGA-Based IEEE 1588 Synchronization System on a 5G Radio Unit Under High Network Load

Synchronization plays an extremely critical factor in a 5G network system as coordinating transmission between 5G cells occurs at very high speed. Precision Time Protocol defined by IEEE 1588 standard is a popular ethernet-based synchronization mechanism between telecommunication devices because of its sub microsecond accuracy. However, maintaining a low time error under high network usage conditions is very challenging. In this article, a synchronization system based on FPGA is developed and implemented for the 5G Radio Unit to cope with such scenarios where time error is raised under high network load. The prototype based on the proposed solution is able to maintain the time error under 100 nanoseconds at under 4Gbps network usage on a 10Gbps link. From 4Gbps and above, the time error did exceed the 100 nanoseconds standard defined by ORAN for 5G fronthaul network but the system still showed a significant improvement compared to the original design.