A model-based approach to clock synchronization - Texas A&M University (TAMU) Scholar

In a network of clocks, we consider a given reference node to determine the time evolution t. We introduce and analyze a stochastic model for clocks, in which the relative speedup of a clock, called the skew, is characterized by some given stochastic process. We study the problem of synchronizing clocks in a network, which amounts to estimating the instantaneous relative skews and relative offsets by exchange of time-stamped packets across the links of the network. We present a scheme for obtaining measurements in a communication link. We develop an algorithm for optimal filtering of measurements across a link (i, j) in order to estimate the logarithm of the relative speedup of node j with respect to node i, and we further study some implementation issues. We also present a scheme for pairwise offset estimation based on skew estimates. We study the properties of our algorithms and provide theoretical guarantees on their performance. We also develop an online centralized model-based asynchronous algorithm for optimal filtering of the time-stamps in the entire network, and an efficient distributed suboptimal scheme. ©2009 IEEE.

2009 Joint 48th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) and 28th Chinese Control Conference (CCC)

Proceedings of the 48h IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) held jointly with 2009 28th Chinese Control Conference

A model-based approach to clock synchronization Conference Paper