A Scalable Protocol for Cooperative Time
Synchronization Using Spatial Averaging.
Authors
A. Hu, S. D. Servetto.
Status
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking; Submitted, October 2006.
Abstract
Time synchronization is an important aspect of sensor
network operation. However, it is well known that synchronization
error accumulates over multiple hops. This presents a challenge for
large-scale, multi-hop sensor networks with a large number of nodes
distributed over wide areas. In this work, we present a protocol
that uses spatial averaging to reduce error accumulation in
large-scale networks. We provide an analysis to quantify the
synchronization improvement achieved using spatial averaging and
find that in a basic cooperative network, the skew and offset
variance decrease approximately as 1/\bar{N} where
\bar{N} is
the number of cooperating nodes. For general networks, simulation
results and a comparison to basic cooperative network results are
used to illustrate the improvement in synchronization performance.