A robust clock synchronization algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Recently, the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) were proposed with the goal of maximizing and assessing the synchronization accuracy in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Because the network delays may assume any distribution and the performance of MLE is quite sensitive to the distribution of network delays, designing clock synchronization algorithms that are robust to unknown network delay distributions appears as an important problem. By adopting a Bayesian framework, this paper proposes a novel clock synchronization algorithm, called Iterative Gaussian Mixture Kalman Particle Filter (IGMKPF), which is shown to achieve good and robust performance in the presence of unknown network delay distributions. The Posterior Cramer-Rao Bound (PCRB) and the Mean-Square Error (MSE) of IGMKPF are evaluated and shown to exhibit improved performance and robustness relative to MLE. © 2011 IEEE.