Fault-Tolerant Clock Synchronization for Safety-Critical Applications

In a distributed system the discrepancy between a node's view of current time and the rest of a system can cause critical deadlines to be missed. It may also be the cause of many unknown system errors. In fact, many real-time applications, such as redundancy management and simultaneous triggering of actuators at several nodes, are impossible without such a global reference time. This paper presents a software-based fault-tolerant clock synchronization technique developed and owned by DRTS Ltd. It provides a predictable and reliable service that enables networked system synchronization down to microsecond precision using negligible network bandwidth.