Defense

Having a shared and accurate sense of time is critical to distributed Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)
and the Internet of Things (IoT). Thanks to decades of research in clock technologies and
synchronization protocols, it is now possible to measure and synchronize time across distributed
systems with unprecedented accuracy. However, applications have not benefited to the same
extent due to limitations of the system services that help manage time, and hardware-OS and

It's common in controller design to assume that the controller reads the sensors and writes to the actuators at the same time instant. This assumption is often violated in practice because the controller executes its code sequentially on a microprocessor. If the microprocessor is "fast enough," often the controller will still work. However, if the sensing and control are done by two different devices that must communicate across a network, the resulting timing uncertainty due to network delays and clock offsets will often destabilize the controller.