Thesis supervisor: Tamás Kovácsházy
Location of studies (in Hungarian): Department of Measurement and Information Systems Abbreviation of location of studies: MIT
Description of the research topic:
Most Cyber-Physical System (CPS) applications require that activities must be executed in real-time (RT-CPS). Autonomous vehicles, telecommunication systems, industrial process measurement and automation, distributed test systems are prime examples. Real-time operation in distributed systems requires time and frequency synchronization for the nodes of the system to guarantee timestamping of events, sampling, and actuation based on the global time with a predefined application-dependent precision and accuracy. IEEE 1588 and its derivatives, such IEEE 802.1ASrev and White Rabbit (from CERN), are standards developed by the international community to solve these problems. Hardware support for IEEE 1588 and its derivatives is present in current microcontrollers (MCU) and application processors; however, the lack of software components, monitoring frameworks, modeling and analysis approaches, system design patterns, safety solutions, etc. makes this field optimal for cutting edge research and development.
The following topics are open for research:
• New servo and holdover mechanisms for better precision and accuracy for standard and low-power CPSs (wired and wireless ones).
• New servo and holdover mechanisms for nomadic systems, in which clock synchronization is only possible for short periods of time, and accuracy and precision must be maintained for off-line operation.
• Safety-related research and development to improve IEEE 1588 and its derivatives in case of Byzantine faults.
• Design and development of performance evaluation solutions for the measurement of clock and frequency synchronization implementations.
• New and innovative applications of clock and frequency synchronization.
BME-MIT has all the necessary HW equipment to research this topic, such as grandmaster clocks, industrial Ethernet switches with clock synchronization support, CPS end devices, precision measurement equipment, etc.
Prerequesits for applying:
• A good understanding of HW, especially microcontrollers and application processors (e.g. TI AMx or NXP iMX line) is required.
• Software in CPS use embedded operating systems such as FreeRTOS or Linux nearly exceptionally; therefore, the developer-level knowledge of at least one of these operating systems is required.
• The practical knowledge of C/C++ is a must, but successful candidates should be ready to learn Python or Matlab (for data analyses or presentation).
Required language skills: English Number of students who can be accepted: 2