Precisely synchronized communication is a major precondition for many industrial applications. At the same time, hardware cost and power consumption need to be kept as low as possible in the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. While many wired solutions on the market achieve these requirements, wireless alternatives are an interesting field for research and development. This article presents a novel IEEE802.11n/ac wireless solution, exhibiting several advantages over state-of-the-art competitors. It is based on a market-available wireless System on a Chip with modified low-level communication firmware combined with a low-cost field-programmable gate array. By achieving submicrosecond synchronization accuracy, our solution outperforms the precision of low-cost products by almost four orders of magnitude. Based on inexpensive hardware, the presented wireless module is up to 20 times cheaper than software-defined-radio solutions with comparable timing accuracy. Moreover, it consumes three to five times less power. To back up our claims, we report data that we collected with a high sampling rate (2000 samples per second) during an extended measurement campaign of more than 120 h, which makes our experimental results far more representative than others reported in the literature. Additional support is provided by the size of the testbed we used during the experiments, composed of a hybrid network with nine nodes divided into two independent wireless segments connected by a wired backbone. In conclusion, we believe that our novel Industrial IoT module architecture will have a significant impact on the future technological development of high-precision time-synchronized communication for the cost-sensitive industrial IoT market.

中文翻译：

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使用低成本物联网模块实现时间同步混合网络

精确同步的通信是许多工业应用的主要先决条件。同时，在物联网 (IoT) 范例中，硬件成本和功耗需要保持尽可能低。虽然市场上的许多有线解决方案都能满足这些要求，但无线替代方案是一个值得研究和开发的有趣领域。本文介绍了一种新颖的 IEEE802.11n/ac 无线解决方案，与最先进的竞争对手相比具有多项优势。它基于市场上可用的无线片上系统，具有经过修改的低级通信固件和低成本现场可编程门阵列。通过实现亚微秒同步精度，我们的解决方案比低成本产品的精度高出近四个数量级。基于廉价的硬件，所展示的无线模块比具有相当定时精度的软件无线电解决方案便宜多达 20 倍。此外，它的功耗要低三到五倍。为了支持我们的说法，我们报告了在超过 120 小时的扩展测量活动中以高采样率（每秒 2000 个样本）收集的数据，这使得我们的实验结果比文献中报道的其他结果更具代表性。我们在实验期间使用的测试床的大小提供了额外的支持，该测试床由一个混合网络组成，该网络具有九个节点，分为两个独立的无线网段，通过有线骨干网连接。综上所述，