Wi-Fi is an obvious candidate for connecting almost any device that can be plugged into a wall, because it’s already running in nearly every home that has broadband. But can all those products work in lockstep when timing matters, like while video and audio are streaming on several devices?
The Wi-Fi Alliance says it has a way to make sure they do. On Thursday at CES, the industry group announced Wi-Fi Certified TimeSync, a specification for precise time synchronization among Wi-Fi devices. It’s expected to be available in the middle of this year.
WhenWi-Fi beganas a wireless way to send packets of data between computers, synchronized clocks didn’t matter. When the packets arrived, the screen appeared or the page was printed. But now that Wi-Fi has a growing role in home entertainment, timing matters.
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例如，房间的两侧上的单独扬声器可以帮助创建沉浸式立体声，并且Wi-Fi可以是连接它们的便捷方式。但如果他们无法在同步中发挥作用，则没有使用它们的点。内容也可能与家庭影院有棘手，包括电视，低音炮和其他几个扬声器。
Wi-Fi Certified TimeSync is designed to ensure that the clocks on different devices are synchronized down to less than a microsecond. Then each component can carry out its role at the right time.
But TimeSync won’t automatically synchronize the clocks on every device that’s certified. Instead, it will be a common tool vendors and industry groups can use to make devices synchronize, said Kevin Robinson, the Alliance’s vice president of marketing. If several vendors want to make their Wi-Fi gear work together on a timing-dependent application, they can use TimeSync to do it.
In addition to audio playback, TimeSync can help with things like making multiple video screens in a vehicle play video together, and it has other applications in industry, health care and IoT, the Alliance says.
罗宾逊说，有一件事是发送IOT命令之间的延迟，就像点击智能手机应用程序一样打开灯光，并看到灯开启，罗宾逊说。当这些延迟发生时，它们不是由时钟设置引起的。
杰西卡的行业分析师Jessica Gropman表示，不匹配的音频或视频播放足以让消费者购买新的连接娱乐装备。对于一般公众开始购买它们，所连接的设备将不得不更好地工作，而不是他们现在的设备更糟糕，她说。
In other areas, synchronized clocks may be even more important as Wi-Fi plays a growing role, Robinson said. For example, some manufacturing processes require several pieces of equipment to carry out tasks in perfect alignment. In health care, different sensors on a patient have to collect time-synchronized data so doctors can relate one event to another.
