General proportional integral observer (GPIO) - based disturbance compensation for minimum variance time synchronization

Precise time synchronization is an enabling technology for mission-critical time-sensitive Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, the crystal oscillator clock which is widely used in IIoT may suffer from periodic disturbances caused by repetitive motion or periodic vibration. To improve the time synchronization of distributed nodes subject to periodic disturbances, this paper proposes a novel disturbance rejection framework, General-Proportional-Integral-Observer-based Disturbance Compensation (GPIO-DC), with the proof of stability, and combined with a 2-freedom control design strategy to optimize both the disturbance rejection and clock tracking performance. And the GPIO’s unique feature of blocking zeros are fully exploited to reject the periodic disturbance at its frequencies and a zero-pole optimal design algorithm is given. With the disturbance being compensated, a disturbance-free minimum variance time synchronization protocol for a complex network is developed and optimized by using Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) to minimize the variance of networked synchronization errors. The performance of the proposed method is devalued by intensive simulation. Comparing with recent relevant research, the proposed method achieves a better performance in disturbance rejection and minimum variance.