ROCS: Exploiting FM Radio Data System for Clock Calibration in Sensor Networks

Clock synchronization is critical for many WSNs due to the need of inter-node coordination and collaborative information processing. Existing protocols based on message passing achieve satisfactory clock synchronization accuracy, however, incur prohibitively high overhead especially in large-scale networks. In this paper, we propose a new clock synchronization approach called ROCS which exploits the radio data system (RDS) from FM radio stations. First, we design a new hardware FM receiver that can extract a periodic pulse from FM broadcasts, referred to as RDS clock. We then conduct a large-scale measurement study of RDS clock in our lab for a period of six days and on a vehicle driving through a metropolitan area of over 40km². Our results show that RDS clock is highly stable and hence is a viable means to calibrate the clocks of large-scale city-wide sensor networks. To reduce the high power consumption of FM receiver, ROCS adaptively calibrates the native clock via the RDS clock. We implement ROCS in TinyOS on our hardware FM receiver and a TelosB-compatible WSN platform. Our extensive experiments using a 12-node testbed and our driving measurement traces show that ROCS achieves accurate and precise clock synchronization with low power consumption.