Efficient consensus synchronization via implicit acknowledgment

A technique for achieving synchronization in wireless networks using only existing traffic is developed. Prior work has either ignored propagation delay, or has required bidirectional messages consisting of explicitly acknowledged unicast transmissions. We develop an approach using “implicit acknowledgment” that achieves precise consensus synchronization by exploiting the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. This significantly reduces the number of transmissions needed for synchronization throughout the network, and is applicable to networks with unacknowledged multicast and broadcast traffic. Results suggest the technique is effective for precise, low-overhead network synchronization, and numerical results are presented for two particular network configurations.