Heterogeneous Synchronization in Converged Wired and Wireless Time-Sensitive Networks

The integration of 5G with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) promises to support the novel requirements of future industrial communication. A key aspect for the industrial application of converged TSN/5G networks is synchronization. Different synchronization scenarios can be identified which are directly affiliated with a particular grandmaster location. The state-of-the-art scenario is a network-sided grandmaster. We propose an novel synchronization scenario which uses a common grandmaster for both the wired and wireless networks. This uniforms the synchronization in converged networks. Our proposed approach achieves a largely improved synchronization towards device-sided devices while introducing only a minor additional error towards network-sided devices. We present and compare our proposal with the state-of-the-art synchronization scenarios, and conduct a formal analysis to estimate the synchronization quality per scenario and simulations to verify the results.