Highly accurate synchronization has become a major requirement because of the rise of distributed applications, regulatory requests and position, navigation and timing backup needs. This fact has led to the development of new technologies which fulfill the new requirements in terms of accuracy and dependability. Nevertheless, some of these novel proposals have lacked determinism, robustness, interoperability, deployability, scalability or management tools preventing them to be extensively used in real industrial scenarios. Different segments require accurate timing information over a large number of nodes. Due to the high availability and low price of global satellite-based time references, many critical distributed facilities depend on them. However, the vulnerability to jamming or spoofing represents a well-known threat and backup systems need to be deployed to mitigate it. The recently approved draft standard IEEE 1588-2019 includes the High Accuracy Default Precision Time Protocol Profile which is intensively based on the White Rabbit protocol. White Rabbit is an extension of current IEEE 1588-2008 network synchronization protocol for sub-nanosecond synchronization. This approach has been validated and intensively used during the last years. This paper revises the pre-standard protocol to expose the challenges that the High Accuracy profile will find after its release and covers existing applications, promising deployments and the technological roadmap, providing hints and an overview of features to be studied. The authors review different issues that have prevented the industrial adoption of White Rabbit in the past and introduce the latest developments that will facilitate the next IEEE 1588 High Accuracy extensive adoption. INDEX TERMS GPS backup, high accuracy profile, IEEE 1588, time dissemination, precision time protocol, PTP, white rabbit.
Time synchronization is a critical feature for many scientific facilities and industrial infrastructures. The required performance is progressively increasing everyday, for instance, few tens of nanoseconds for Fifth Generation (5G) networks or sub-nanosecond accuracy on next family of particle accelerators and astrophysics telescopes. Due to this exigent accuracy, many applications require specific timing dedicated networks, increasing the system cost and complexity. Under this context, the new IEEE 1588-2019 High Accuracy (HA) default profile is intensively based on White Rabbit (WR) which can provide sub-nanosecond accurate synchronization for Ethernet networks. However, current WR solutions have not been designed to work properly with high data bandwidth delivery services even in 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) links. On this contribution, the authors propose a new architecture design that enables WR and, consequently, the IEEE 1588-2019 HA profile to be deployed over 10 GbE links solving the already identified data bandwidth problem. Furthermore, this work addresses different experiments needed to characterize the system performance in terms of time synchronization and data transfer. As final result, this contribution presents for the first time in the literature a new WR system which allows high bandwidth data exchange in 10 GbE networks while providing sub-nanosecond accuracy synchronization. The proposed solution maintains the time synchronization performance of existing WR 1 GbE devices with significant advantages in terms of latency and data bandwidth, enabling its deployment in applications that integrate data and synchronization information in the same network.
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