Resilience bounds of sensing-based network clock synchronization

• Main Authors: Tan, Rui, Jiang, Linshan, Easwaran, Arvind, Shanmuga Sundaram, Jothi Prasanna
• Other Authors: School of Computer Science and Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering; Clock Synchronization; Fault Tolerance
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/143213
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Recent studies exploited external periodic synchronous signals to synchronize a pair of network nodes to address a threat of delaying the communications between the nodes. However, the sensing-based synchronization may yield faults due to nonmalicious signal and sensor noises. This paper considers a system of N nodes that will fuse their peer-to-peer synchronization results to correct the faults. Our analysis gives the lower bound of the number of faults that the system can tolerate when N is up to 12. If the number of faults is no greater than the lower bound, the faults can be identified and corrected. We also prove that the system cannot tolerate more than N - 2 faults. Our results can guide the design of resilient sensing-based clock synchronization systems.