Estimation Theory-Based Robust Phase Offset Determination in Presence of Possible Path Asymmetries

This paper addresses the problem of robust clock phase offset estimation for the IEEE 1588 precision time protocol in the presence of unknown asymmetric network path delays. The presence of an unknown asymmetry between the path delays can lead to significant degradation in the performance of a phase offset estimation scheme. Assuming multiple master-slave communication paths are available, we first provide lower bounds on the best achievable performance for a phase offset estimation scheme in the presence of asymmetric master-slave communication paths. We then present a novel phase offset estimation scheme that employs the expectation-maximization algorithm to identify the asymmetric master–slave communication paths. After discarding information from these paths, we employ the minimax optimum vector location parameter estimator for estimating the phase offset. Simulation results are presented to show that the proposed phase offset estimation scheme exhibits performance close to the lower bounds in a wide variety of network scenarios.

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