Outlier Identification in Sensor Network Clock Synchronization

Abstract

We first present a survey of clock synchronization research that describes the problem and various challenges to implementing an efficient protocol for clock synchronization in sensor networks. We then present several changes to an existing protocol that we believe will enhance the accuracy. These changes are implemented in a software simulation and a large experiment is conducted that involves several runs of the simulation using various parameters for error bounds and outlier detection. We present our results and show that modifying the outlier detection range used by many existing algorithms can improve network clock accuracy and provide a stabilized average error.