Clock Drift Compensation for Master-Slave Clock Synchronization in EtherCAT Networks

Clock synchronization represents an essential necessity for EtherCAT networks. This letter proposes a practical and efficient clock drift compensation scheme for the master-slave clock synchronization in EtherCAT networks, which decouples and then minimizes the adverse effect of master jitters for synchronization without degrading the clock synchronization performance between slave devices. Moreover, our method requires no modifications to the original EtherCAT protocol, nor does it introduce any additional bandwidth overhead. Comparative experimental results demonstrate the performance enhancement of the proposed approach over existing methods.