A combined hardware-software approach for acoustic sensor network synchronization

In this paper we present an approach for synchronizing a wireless acoustic sensor network using a two-stage procedure. First the clock frequency and phase differences between pairs of nodes are estimated employing a two-way message exchange protocol. The estimates are further improved in a Kalman filter with a dedicated observation error model. In the second stage network-wide synchronization is achieved by means of a gossiping algorithm which estimates the average clock frequency and phase of the sensor nodes. These averages are viewed as frequency and phase of a virtual master clock, to which the clocks of the sensor nodes have to be adjusted. The amount of adjustment is computed in a specific control loop. While these steps are done in software, the actual sampling rate correction is carried out in hardware by using an adjustable frequency synthesizer. Experimental results obtained from hardware devices and software simulations of large scale networks are presented.