Towards Expanding Precise Timing for Collaborative Its with Deterministic Communications in 6G

The demand for precise timing continues to grow with the rapid development of smart cities, where intelligent transportation emerges as a critical application heavily dependent on accurate time distribution. Deterministic communication is anticipated to be a defining feature of nextgeneration mobile networks (6G), enabling end-to-end timecritical applications, and unlocking new possibilities for achieving end-to-end precise time synchronization as well. To cope with the challenge of delivering precise time synchronization across broader areas at a lower cost, this paper proposes a method to achieve end-to-end precise time synchronization by leveraging the deterministic characteristics of communication networks. Specially, the proposed approach adopts the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm to implement deterministic networking for the seamless integration of Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and cellular networks. Furthermore, to mitigate the impact of wireless channel uncertainties on synchronization accuracy, we propose a network delay measurement mechanism based on the principle of time redundancy, designed to reduce end-to-end network delay variation. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating its capability to constrain the end-to-end relative time error of wired and wireless converged networks to the microsecond scale, without necessitating modifications to the existing network infrastructure.