Estimating a time offset between stationary clocks

Abstract

Time synchronization of two clocks is disclosed herein, such as two stationary clocks. A global time signal from a global time reference or common time source can be used to calculate a common view based clock offset between the two clocks. In parallel, a network based clock offset between the two clocks can be calculated based on messages exchanged over a communication network interconnecting the two clocks, without reverting to the global time reference. Two recent values (e.g., the two most recent values) of the common view clock offset and the network based clock offset can be combined or superposed in a seamless way to produce a final time offset estimate. The combination of independently calculated common view and network based clock offsets can be a weighted average of the two values, involving respective weights based on quality estimates of the latter. The time synchronization schemes based on a Global Positioning System (GPS) and a wide area communication network can be combined to synchronize the stationary clocks of phasor measurement units (PMUs) of a wide area monitoring system to a central server clock at a Network Control Center (NCC) of the system.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.