Optimal clock synchronization in networks

  • Authors:

  • Christoph Lenzen;Philipp Sommer;Roger Wattenhofer

  • Affiliations:

  • ETH Zurich, Switzerland;ETH Zurich, Switzerland;ETH Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Having access to an accurate time is a vital building block in all networks; in wireless sensor networks even more so, because wireless media access or data fusion may depend on it. Starting out with a novel analysis, we show that orthodox clock synchronization algorithms make fundamental mistakes. The state-of-the-art clock synchronization algorithm FTSP exhibits an error that grows exponentially with the size of the network, for instance. Since the involved parameters are small, the error only becomes visible in midsize networks of about 10--20 nodes. In contrast, we present PulseSync, a new clock synchronization algorithm that is asymptotically optimal. We evaluate PulseSync on a Mica2 testbed, and by simulation on larger networks. On a 20 node network, the prototype implementation of PulseSync outperforms FTSP by a factor of 5. Theory and simulation show that for larger networks, PulseSync offers an accuracy which is several orders of magnitude better than FTSP. To round off the presentation, we investigate several optimization issues, e.g. media access and local skew.