Clock Drift Analysis In a Multihost System
Gokhan Bilekdemir · 2021
The demand for new software-based features in automotive systems is increasing day by day. This leads to the increasing complexity of embedded systems. A distributed real-time system consists of a set of nodes that are interconnected by a local area network and communicate via message passing only. The order of the events can be interpreted by time. Clocks are typically local counters that are increased with a predefined rate according to real-time. Clock synchronization algorithms ensure that any two clocks in the system read the same value at about the same point in realtime. This is achieved by clock synchronization that changes the current values of the clocks, the clocks' rate, or both. Synchronization ensures that operations occur in the logically correct order. Clock drift happens when the local clock gets calculated incorrectly, causing it to slowly drift in real-time. Larger deviations and increased drift are observed while the system is running without any synchronization. This paper is aimed to present a process to find the root cause of a clock drift problem.