Enabling TSN over IEEE 802.11: Low-overhead Time Synchronization for Wi-Fi Clients

The ever-increasing need for real-time communication of factory processes in one hand, and the offered flexibility of wireless communication on the other, is pushing Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) evolution towards the wireless networks. By definition, wireless networks are non-deterministic due to their random channel access mechanism. In order to introduce TSN vision to the wireless world, such randomness needs to be controlled. In this paper, we implement a low-overhead beacon-based time synchronization mechanism that offers synchronization accuracy of as low as 10 µs, on average, for low beacon interval. Such accuracy is achieved by implementing a follow-up beacon packet, in addition to beacon mechanism itself, in order to account for any delays in sending beacons. The synchronization mechanism is tested in different intra and inter access point communication settings.