Improving Accuracy and Robustness of Clock Parameters Estimation Using Multi-Link Overhearing in Wireless Sensor Networks
Xiaojiang Liu, Heng Wang · 2023
Receiver-only synchronization (ROS) is a strategy in which nodes only need to receive packets to achieve clock synchronization. Since no packet transmission is required, it has been extensively studied in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where energy resources are rare. Nevertheless, there is a performance loss in synchronization accuracy and robustness of the inactive nodes in the ROS scenario because these nodes are synchronized with a reference node only by overhearing. In addition, it is observed that in a practical network, the execution of ROS inevitably overhears paired synchronization messages from multiple communication paths. With the help of this feature, on the basis of the clock parameters estimation method and information aggregation technique, a linear aggregation estimation mechanism with outlier diagnostic is presented to improve the synchronization accuracy and robustness in ROS with multi-link overhearing scenario. Finally, numerical simulations are implemented based on two single path clock parameters estimation algorithms of inactive nodes, and simulation results demonstrate that the synchronization accuracy and robustness are significantly enhanced.