On Clock Synchronization Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks Under Unknown Delay

In this paper, three clock-synchronization algorithms for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) under unknown delay are derived. They include the maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE), a generalization of the estimator of Noh , and a novel low-complexity estimator. Their corresponding performance bounds are derived and compared, and complexities are also analyzed. It is found that the MLE achieves the best performance with the price of high complexity. For the generalized version of the estimator of Noh , although it has low complexity, its performance is degraded with respect to the MLE. On the other hand, the newly proposed estimator achieves the same performance as the MLE, and the complexity is at the same level as that of the generalized version of the estimator of Noh et al.