A robust approach for clock offset estimation in wireless sensor networks

Erchin Serpedin*, Jang Sub Kim, Jaehan Lee, Khalid Qaraqe

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) for the clock phase offset assuming a two-way message exchange mechanism between the nodes of a wireless sensor network were recently derived assuming Gaussian and exponential network delays. However, the MLE performs poorly in the presence of non-Gaussian or nonexponential network delay distributions. Currently, there is a need to develop clock synchronization algorithms that are robust to the distribution of network delays. This paper proposes a clock offset estimator based on the composite particle filter (CPF) to cope with the possible asymmetries and non-Gaussianity of the network delay distributions. Also, a variant of the CPF approach based on the bootstrap sampling (BS) is shown to exhibit good performance in the presence of reduced number of observations. Computer simulations illustrate that the basic CPF and its BS-based variant present superior performance than MLE under general random network delay distributions such as asymmetric Gaussian, exponential, Gamma, Weibull as well as various mixtures.

Original languageEnglish
Article number132381
JournalEurasip Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
Volume2010
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes

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