Design and Implementation of a New Wireless Time Synchronization Method Over IEEE 802.11

The demands for industrial ubiquitous communications promote the development of real-time and high-reliability wireless communication techniques. Accurate time synchronization is a critical foundation for deterministic communications. However, many wireless time synchronization methods achieve poor accuracy, while others take the high hardware costs and can not be used in practice. How to design high precision wireless time synchronization method with reasonable hardware costs is still a big challenge. Therefore, without affecting Wi-Fi protocol stack, a new medium access control (MAC) layer-based approach is proposed in this article to implement precision time synchronization with an open-source Wi-Fi design. The software protocol stack only needs to send handshake messages carrying identifiers, and timestamps are inserted and extracted from handshake messages as they pass through the MAC synchronization architecture designed in field programmable gate array. In the single-hop synchronization experiment, the synchronization accuracy is tested with and without network load. Comparing with other methods in several literatures, the results of the proposed solution unequivocally demonstrate the effectiveness and excellent wireless time synchronization precision, with 99% absolute time synchronization errors under 50% and 100% loads within 200 ns and 1 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula>s, respectively.