Comparison of time synchronization techniques in a distributed collaborative swarm system

Time drift in distributed systems is an important issue especially for mobile ad hoc networks. Indeed, it can break the synchronization between the internal clocks of the nodes. Consequently, protocols over such networks should consider this problem in the case where they need to use time information. In this paper, we define a new collaborative system for autonomous mobile robots called AMiRALE. We present three versions of this system each with different time constraints. We provide its theoretical description as well as simulation results according to a park cleaning scenario. Results show that time synchronization has a limited impact on the efficiency of our collaborative system.