Sundial: Using Sunlight to Reconstruct Global Timestamps

Authors:
Jayant Gupchup;Răzvan Musăloiu-E.;Alex Szalay;Andreas Terzis
Affiliations:
Computer Science Department, Johns Hopkins University,;Computer Science Department, Johns Hopkins University,;Physics and Astronomy Department, Johns Hopkins University,;Computer Science Department, Johns Hopkins University,
Venue:
EWSN '09 Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks
Year:
2009

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Abstract

This paper investigates postmortem timestamp reconstruction in environmental monitoring networks. In the absence of a time-synchronization protocol, these networks use multiple pairs of (local, global) timestamps to retroactively estimate the motes' clock drift and offset and thus reconstruct the measurement time series. We present Sundial , a novel offline algorithm for reconstructing global timestamps that is robust to unreliable global clock sources. Sundial reconstructs timestamps by correlating annual solar patterns with measurements provided by the motes' inexpensive light sensors. The surprising ability to accurately estimate the length of day using light intensity measurements enables Sundial to be robust to arbitrary mote clock restarts. Experimental results, based on multiple environmental network deployments spanning a period of over 2.5 years, show that Sundial achieves accuracy as high as 10 parts per million (ppm), using solar radiation readings recorded at 20 minute intervals.