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Estimating clock uncertainty for efficient duty-cycling in sensor networks

Published: 02 November 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Radio duty cycling has received significant attention in sensor networking literature, particularly in the form of protocols for medium access control and topology management. While many protocols have claimed to achieve significant duty-cycling benefits in theory and simulation, these benefits have often not translated to practice. The dominant factor that prevents the optimal usage of the radio in real deployment settings is time uncertainty between sensor nodes. This paper proposes an uncertainty-driven approach to duty-cycling where a model of long-term clock drift is used to minimize the duty-cycling overhead. First, we use long-term empirical measurements to evaluate and analyze in-depth the interplay between three key parameters that influence long-term synchronization - synchronization rate, history of past synchronization beacons and the estimation scheme. Second, we use this measurement-based study to design a rate-adaptive, energy-efficient long-term time synchronization algorithm that can adapt to changing clock drift and environmental conditions while achieving application-specific precision with very high probability. Finally, we integrate our uncertainty-driven time synchronization scheme with a MAC layer protocol, BMAC, and empirically demonstrate one to two orders of magnitude reduction in the transmit energy consumption at a node with negligible impact on the packet loss rate.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SenSys '05: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems
    November 2005
    340 pages
    ISBN:159593054X
    DOI:10.1145/1098918
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 02 November 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. clock drift
    2. polynomial model estimation
    3. rate adaptation
    4. sampling period
    5. sensor networks
    6. time synchronization

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    SenSys05: ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems
    November 2 - 4, 2005
    California, San Diego, USA

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 198 of 990 submissions, 20%

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    • (2021)Cross-Layer MAC Protocol for Semantic Wireless Sensor NetworkWireless Personal Communications: An International Journal10.1007/s11277-021-08603-z120:4(3135-3151)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2021
    • (2020)Towards Optimal Synchronization Scheduling in Internet of (Heterogeneous) Things2019 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM)10.1109/GLOBECOM38437.2019.9014181(1-6)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2020
    • (2020)DQTSM: Distributed Qos in Time Synchronized MAC Protocol for WSNsQoS Routing Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks10.1007/978-981-15-2720-3_5(71-81)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2020
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    • (2017)Design of asynchronous semantic preamble listening for semantic sensor network to avoid early overhearing2017 International Conference on Wireless Communications, Signal Processing and Networking (WiSPNET)10.1109/WiSPNET.2017.8299790(420-424)Online publication date: Mar-2017
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