Dynamic drift compensation for the distributed clock in EtherCAT

This paper focuses on the synchronization between master clock and slave clock in the Distributed clock of EtherCAT. It supports very accurate synchronization function which let local slaves follow reference time under the degree of few nano second differences. However, there exists the propagation delay between reference clock and slave clock. To remove the delay, EtherCAT uses the static compensation method but it wastes a lot of control frames and leads each slave to be delayed. To solve this problem, we design the dynamic compensation model for the local source drift. This method is beneficial to the Embedded system because it efficiently manages the system resource of the target system by trade off cyclic time and accuracy of synchronizing the time.