A Cost-Effective Synchronization Method for Distributed Flight Control Computers

This paper presents a straightforward, practical synchronization method for distributed flight control computers (FCCs): the Event-sync Protocol for Flight Computer Networks (EPFCN). As physically dispersed processors do not have a common knowledge of time, this causes asynchronous behavior among the FCCs. All processors can read and vote input values from sensors at different times. The main problem with this kind of phenomenon is that all control functions will work on different data sets and thus will produce different outputs. Therefore, a synchronization algorithm with a cost-effective message exchange mechanism has been designed and implemented without requiring dedicated synchronization hardware. The implementation results show that the EPFCN algorithm is able to synchronize the distributed redundant FCCs with high precision synchronization and compensate for the relative clock drifts.