Integrated Cooperative Synchronization for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

A precise decentralized clock synchronization method, referred to as integrated cooperative synchronization (ICS) is proposed in this letter. ICS is a delay compensating method that relies on mean-field message passing, where the measurement phase is integrated into the message passing phase. By selecting an extended factorization of the underlying joint a-posteriori distribution of the clock parameters and an appropriate message scheduling for link initialization, ICS is conceptually much simpler than conventional message-passing methods while achieving similar accuracy and reduced computational complexity. Moreover, it has only slightly higher implementation requirements compared to less accurate consensus methods.