A Clock Synchronization Method for Distributed Systems Based on Fractional Calculus

Clock Synchronization plays an important role in distributed systems. However, the practical synchronization accuracy is far below the theoretical value due to various factors. The main factor is the oscillator frequency drift causing time error between the master clock and the slave clock. Once the time error is detected and compensated, the synchronization accuracy will he greatly improved. This paper proposes a new clock synchronization method based on fractional calculus to extract out the time error in a high precision. Both simulative and experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed approach is effective.