Clock Synchronization in Wireless Embedded Applications

With the proliferation of wireless network and the advances of the embedded systems, the traditional distributed systems begin to include the wireless embedded systems. Clock synchronization in the distributed systems is one of the major issues that should be considered for diverse Purposes including synchronization, ordering, and consistency. Many clock synchronization algorithms have been proposed over the years. Since clock synchronization in wireless embedded systems should consider the low bandwidth of a network and the poor resources of a system, most traditional algorithms cannot be applied directly. We propose a clock synchronization algorithm in wireless embedded systems, extending IEEE 802.11 standard. The proposed algorithm can not only achieve high precision by loosening constraints and utilizing the characteristics of wireless broadcast but also provide continuous time synchronization by tolerating the message losses. In master/slave structure the master broadcasts the time information and the stave computes the clock skew and the drift to estimate the synchronized time of the master. The experiment results show that the achieved standard deviation by the Proposed scheme is within the bound of about 200 microseconds.