A distributed consensus protocol for clock synchronization in wireless sensor network

This paper describes a novel consensus-based protocol, referred as Average TimeSync (ATS), for synchronizing a wireless sensor. This algorithm is based on a class of popular distributed algorithms known as consensus, agreement, gossip or rendezvous whose main idea is averaging local information. The proposed algorithm has three main features. Firstly, it is fully distributed and therefore robust to node failure and to new node appearance. Secondly, it compensates for clock skew differences among nodes, thus maintaining the network synchronized for longer periods than using simple clock offset compensation. Finally, it is computationally lite as it involves only simple sum/product operations. The algorithm has been implemented and preliminary experimental results are provided.