Abstract

Time synchronization is an essential service in distributed computing and control systems. It is used to enable tasks such as synchronized data sampling and accurate time-of-flight estimation, which can be used to locate nodes. The deviation in nodes' knowledge of time and inter-node resynchronization rate are affected by three sources of time stamping errors: network wireless communication delays, platform hardware and software delays, and environment-dependent frequency drift characteristics of the clock source. The focus of this work is on the last source of error, the clock source, which becomes a bottleneck when either required time accuracy or available energy budget and bandwidth (and thus feasible resynchronization rate) are too stringent. Traditionally, this has required the use of expensive clock sources (such as temperature compensation using precise sensors and calibration models) that are not …

Date

June 2, 2008

Authors

Thomas Schmid, Zainul Charbiwala, Jonathan Friedman, Young H Cho, Mani B Srivastava

Journal

ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review

Volume

36

Issue

1

Pages

97-108

Publisher

ACM