Extended Reference Broadcast Infrastructure Synchronization Protocol in 5G and Beyond

Abstract

In order to enable all types of use cases that are proposed within 5G and B5G factory scenarios, an accurate and precise time synchronization is required. Here, the so-called RBIS protocol is a possible solution since it was specifically designed for infrastructure-based wireless communications. While the use of RBIS protocol has a lot of benfits, a strong weakness is its restriction to the range of a single gNB. Thus, a concept for the extension of the RBIS protocol is proposed within this work, as well as a mapping to 5G and B5G systems.In order to prove the suitability of this approach, a simulation that is based on a reference scenario that was specified by NGMN, 3GPP, and IEEE, is carried out. Moreover, as the performance is dependent on the number of users and their mobility, either a tradeoff between minimum number of UEs and performance has to be done, or the usage of dedicated synchronization UEs that are able to guarantee the time synchronization quality.