Temperature compensated Kalman distributed clock synchronization

Time synchronization is a fundamental problem in any distributed system. In particular, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) require scalable time synchronization for implementing distributed tasks on multiple sensor nodes. We propose a temperature-compensated Kalman based distributed synchronization protocol (TKDS) using a two-way sender-receiver synchronization scheme, to achieve high synchronization accuracy while modelling the clock skew change based on its physical characteristics. By asynchronously combining estimates from neighbours, TKDS achieves better performance than the spanning tree based protocols in a fully-distributed fashion. The synchronization performance is evaluated numerically and compared with that of other well-known synchronization protocols.