Low complexity clock synchronization algor ithm for wireless sensor networks with unknown delay

In this paper, the problem of clock synchronization is analyzed based on the two-way message exchange mechanism. In order to estimate the clock offset and the clock skew with unknown fixed delay, the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and a low-complexity estimator are proposed. Furthermore, their corresponding performance limits and complexities are analyzed. It is found that the MLE achieves the best performance with the price of high complexity, while the newly proposed estimator achieves the same performance as the MLE with low complexity. © 2009 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe IEEE Conference on Wireless Communications and Networking (WCNC 2009), Budapest, Hungary, 5-8 April 2009. In Proceedings of IEEE WCNC, 2009, p. 1-