Benchmarking OpenWiFiSync on ESP32: Towards Cost-Effective Wireless Time Synchronization

TL;DR

This paper presents an open-source implementation of a wireless time synchronization protocol on ESP32 devices, achieving high accuracy at low cost, suitable for Industry 4.0 applications.

Contribution

We implement and validate the Reference Broadcast Infrastructure Synchronization protocol on ESP32 hardware, demonstrating cost-effective high-precision wireless synchronization.

Findings

Synchronization accuracy within +/-30 microseconds achieved

Implementation is open-source and energy-efficient

Suitable for diverse Industry 4.0 applications

Abstract

Wireless time synchronization of mobile devices is a key enabler for numerous Industry 4.0 applications, such as coordinated and synchronized tasks or the generation of high-precision timestamps for machine learning or artificial intelligence algorithms. Traditional wireline clock synchronization protocols, however, cannot achieve the performance in wireless environments without significant modifications. To address this challenge, we make use of the Reference Broadcast Infrastructure Synchronization protocol, which leverages the broadcast nature of wireless communications and remains both non-invasive and standard-compliant. We implement and validate this protocol on a low-cost testbed using ESP32 modules and a commercial Wi-Fi access point. To support further research and development, we release our implementation as open-source software under the GNU General Public License Version 3 license via the OpenWifiSync project on GitHub. Our results demonstrate that synchronization accuracies within +/-30 microseconds are achievable using energy-efficient and affordable hardware, making this approach suitable for a wide range of use cases.