Clock synchronization without exchanging timestamps

Clock synchronization is essential not only for precise data integration and sensor reading fusion in wireless sensor networks which consists of distributed sensors but for packet-switched networks. Over past years, clock synchronization techniques have been proposed for different environments and applications. In this paper, we propose a novel clock synchronization protocol which does not require timestamp exchanges. This proposed protocol focuses on enhancing energy efficiency and communication bandwidth efficiency, and can be realized without any additional message transmissions. This paper shows maximum likelihood estimator of clock skew and clock offset and the corresponding Cramer-Rao lower bounds under Gaussian delay model. Moreover, it is demonstrated that this protocol has the same performance to traditional timestamping techniques through simulations.