Implementation of a Network-wide Time Synchronization Strategy for WirelessHART

摘要

Wireless HART is an international wireless communication standard proposed by HART Communication Foundation. As a crucial technique for wireless networks, time synchronization plays an important role especially in Wireless HART networks. For constant and reliable communication, it is necessary to provide precise network-wide time synchronization for TDMAbased Wireless HART. The network-wide time synchronization (NWTS) on an open source platform named OMNeT++ was implemented in this paper. In addition, we not only adopted a proposed Kalman-Filtering algorithm to ensure the precise synchronization but also designed a NWTS mechanism for Wireless HART. Moreover, we detailedly designed the mechanism of selecting and synchronizing the time reference sources (TRSs). Finally, we evaluated this implementation and made a comparison to TPSN in the aspect of error, robustness and power consumption.