Reverse Flooding: exploiting radio interference for efficient propagation delay compensation in WSN clock synchronization
Author
Summary, in English
Clock synchronization is a necessary component in modern distributed systems, especially WSN. Despite the great effort and the numerous improvements, the existing synchronization schemes do not yet address the cancellation of propagation delays. Up to a few years ago, this was not perceived as a problem, because the time-stamping precision was a more limiting factor for the accuracy achievable with a synchronization scheme. However, the recent introduction of efficient flooding schemes based on constructive interference has greatly improved the achievable accuracy, to the point where propagation delays can effectively become the main source of error.
In this paper, we propose a method to estimate and compensate for the network propagation delays. Our proposal does not require to maintain a spanning tree of the network, and exploits constructive interference even to transmit packets whose content are slightly different. To show the validity of the approach, we implemented the propagation delay estimator on top of the FLOPSYNC-2 synchronization scheme.
Experimental results prove the feasibility of measuring propagation delays using off-the-shelf microcontrollers and radio transceivers, and show how the proposed solution allows to achieve sub-microsecond clock synchronization even for networks where propagation delays are significant.
In this paper, we propose a method to estimate and compensate for the network propagation delays. Our proposal does not require to maintain a spanning tree of the network, and exploits constructive interference even to transmit packets whose content are slightly different. To show the validity of the approach, we implemented the propagation delay estimator on top of the FLOPSYNC-2 synchronization scheme.
Experimental results prove the feasibility of measuring propagation delays using off-the-shelf microcontrollers and radio transceivers, and show how the proposed solution allows to achieve sub-microsecond clock synchronization even for networks where propagation delays are significant.
Department/s
Publishing year
2016
Language
English
Pages
175-184
Publication/Series
Proceedings - Real-Time Systems Symposium
Full text
Document type
Conference paper
Topic
- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering
Conference name
36th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS)
Conference date
2015-12-01
Conference place
San Antonio, TX, United States
Status
Published
Project
- LCCC
Research group
- LCCC