Average TimeSync: a consensus-based protocol for time synchronization in wireless sensor networks1

This paper describes a novel consensus-based protocol, referred as Average TimeSync (ATS), for synchronizing a wireless sensor network. This algorithm is based on a cascade of two consensus algorithms, whose main idea is averaging local information. The proposed algorithm has the advantage to be totally distributed, asynchronous, robust to packet drop and sensor node failure, and it is adaptive to clock drifts and changes on the communication topology. In particular, we provide a rigorous proof of convergence to global synchronization in the absence of process noise, measurement noise and communication delay, and we show its effectiveness through a number of experiments performed on a wireless sensor network.