TurboSync: Clock synchronization for shared media networks via principal component analysis with missing data

Clock synchronization is particularly challenging in resource constrained networks. This paper presents an accurate, coherent and bandwidth efficient synchronization scheme called TurboSync. Unlike traditional solutions that synchronize pairs of nodes, TurboSync is able to synchronize entire node clusters. TurboSync relies on principal component analysis with missing data. Packets are broadcasted on the medium and their capture times at each node side are used to compute the clock conversion parameters. To have a complete and usable set of capture times for each broadcast, we propose to fill out the missing packet timestamps at the transmitters' side using an inference mechanism. TurboSync synchronizes all the clocks in the cluster at a time which leads to coherent clock conversion between nodes. Our performance results show better accuracy compared to the RBS protocol. © 2011 IEEE.