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Rate-adaptive time synchronization for long-lived sensor networks

Published: 06 June 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Time synchronization is critical to sensor networks at many layers of its design and enables better duty-cycling of the radio, accurate localization, beamforming and other collaborative signal processing. While there has been significant work in sensor network synchronization, measurement based studies have been restricted to very short-term (few minutes) datasets and have focused on obtaining accurate instantaneous synchronization. Long-term synchronization has typically been handled by periodic re-synchronization schemes with beacon intervals of a few minutes based on the assumption that long-term drift is too hard to model and predict. Thus, none of this work exploits the temporally correlated behavior of the clock drift. Yet, there are incredible energy gains to be achieved from better modeling and prediction of long-term drift that can provide bounds on long-term synchronization error across a sensor network. Better synchronization can lead to significantly lower duty-cycles of the radio, simplify signal processing and can enable an order of magnitude greater lifetime than current techniques.We measure, evaluate and analyze in-depth the long-term behavior of synchronization skew and drift on typical Mica sensor nodes and develop an efficient long-term time synchronization protocol. We use four real time data sets gathered over periods of 12-30 hours in different environmental conditions to study the interplay between three key parameters that influence long-term synchronization - synchronization rate, history of past synchronization beacons and the estimation scheme. We use this measurement-based study to design an online adaptive time-synchronization algorithm that can adapt to changing clock drift and environmental conditions while achieving application-specified precision with very high probability. We find that our algorithm achieves between one and two orders of magnitude improvement in energy efficiency over currently available time-synchronization approaches.

References

[1]
Elson, J., Girod, L., and Estrin, D. Fine-grained time synchronization using reference broadcasts. Fifth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, December 2002.
[2]
Ganeriwal, S., Kumar, R., and Srivastava, M. B. Timing-sync protocol for sensor network. First ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, November 2003.
[3]
Maroti, M., Kusy, B., Simon, G., and Ledeczi., A. The Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol. Second ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, November 2004.

Cited By

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  • (2015)Time synchronisation with improved accuracy for TDMA-based wireless sensor networksInternational Journal of Sensor Networks10.1504/IJSNET.2015.07138719:1(20-27)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2015
  • (2012)Energy efficient GPS sensing with cloud offloadingProceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems10.1145/2426656.2426666(85-98)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2012
  • (2009)On the Multihop Performance of Synchronization Mechanisms in High Propagation Delay NetworksIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2008.22058:5(577-590)Online publication date: 1-May-2009
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  1. Rate-adaptive time synchronization for long-lived sensor networks

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGMETRICS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
    June 2005
    428 pages
    ISBN:1595930221
    DOI:10.1145/1064212
    • cover image ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
      ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review  Volume 33, Issue 1
      Performance evaluation review
      June 2005
      417 pages
      ISSN:0163-5999
      DOI:10.1145/1071690
      Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 06 June 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. clock drift
    2. sensor networks
    3. time synchronization

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 459 of 2,691 submissions, 17%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2015)Time synchronisation with improved accuracy for TDMA-based wireless sensor networksInternational Journal of Sensor Networks10.1504/IJSNET.2015.07138719:1(20-27)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2015
    • (2012)Energy efficient GPS sensing with cloud offloadingProceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems10.1145/2426656.2426666(85-98)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2012
    • (2009)On the Multihop Performance of Synchronization Mechanisms in High Propagation Delay NetworksIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2008.22058:5(577-590)Online publication date: 1-May-2009
    • (2007)Cluster based hierarchical wireless sensor networks (CHWSN) and time synchronization in CHWSN2007 International Symposium on Communications and Information Technologies10.1109/ISCIT.2007.4392190(1149-1154)Online publication date: Oct-2007
    • (2006)On the scalability of routing integrated time synchronizationProceedings of the Third European conference on Wireless Sensor Networks10.1007/11669463_11(115-131)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2006
    • (2012)Self-healing in unattended wireless sensor networksACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/2379799.23798069:1(1-21)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2012
    • (2009)Confidentiality and integrity for data aggregation in WSN using peer monitoringSecurity and Communication Networks10.1002/sec.932:2(181-194)Online publication date: 7-Jan-2009
    • (2008)POSHProceedings of the 2008 Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems10.1109/SRDS.2008.23(185-194)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2008

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