Evaluation of EtherCAT clock synchronization in distributed control systems

Support for the precise time synchronization of EtherCAT, known as distributed clock (DC), enables the design of highly synchronized operations in distributed real-time systems. This study evaluates the performance of the EtherCAT DC through extensive experiments in a real automation system. We constructed an EtherCAT control system using Xenomai and IgH EtherCAT stack, and analyzed the clock deviation for different devices in the network. The results of the evaluation revealed that the accuracy of the synchronized clock is affected by several factors such as the number of slave devices, period of drift compensation, and type of system time base. In particular, we found that careful decision regarding the system time base is required because it has a fundamental effect on the master operation, which results in significantly different performance characteristics.