Estimation of clock parameters and performance benchmarks for synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are a key vehicle for driving many future applications, most of which require the logical clocks of the constituent nodes to by closely synchronized in time with each other. Applying the concepts from the field of statistical signal processing in this area can yield many fruitful results and advance the state of the art in this technology. This paper illustrates a summary of the main results achieved so far by working in this particular direction, which includes the derivation of Maximum Likelihood Estimators (MLE) of the clock parameters, namely the clock offset, skew and drift as well as the link delays, the lower bounds on their performance and two simplified schemes for power conservation in the context of WSNs.