Time synchronization is essential for industrial IoT and Industry 4.0/5.0 applications, but achieving high synchronization accuracy in Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN)-5G networks is challenging due to jitter and asymmetric delays. 3GPP TS 23.501 defines three 5G synchronization modes: time-aware system, boundary clock (BC), and transparent clock (TC), where TC offers a promising solution. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no empirical evaluation of TC in a TSN-5G network. This paper empirically evaluates an 5G end-to-end TC in a TSN-5G network, implemented on commercial TSN switches with a single clock. For TC development, we compute the residence time in 5G and recover the clock domain at the slave node. We deploy a TSN-5G testbed with commercial equipment for synchronization evaluation by modifying the Precision Timing Protocol (PTP) message transmission rates. Experimental results show a peak-to-peak synchronization of 500 ns, meeting the industrial requirement of < 1 us, with minimal synchronization offsets for specific PTP message transmission rates.
@article{arxiv.2509.06454,
title = {Empirical Evaluation of a 5G Transparent Clock for Time Synchronization in a TSN-5G Network},
author = {Julia Caleya-Sanchez and Pablo Muñoz and Jorge Sánchez-Garrido and Emilio Florentín and Felix Delgado-Ferro and Pablo Rodriguez-Martin and Pablo Ameigeiras},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.06454},
year = {2026}
}