Firefly synchronization with phase rate equalization and its experimental analysis in wireless systems

The convergence and precision of synchronization algorithms based on the theory of pulse-coupled oscillators is evaluated on programmable radios. Measurements in different wireless topologies show that such algorithms reach precisions in the low microsecond range. Based on the observation that phase rate deviation among radios is a limiting factor for the achievable precision, we propose a distributed algorithm for automatic phase rate equalization and show by experiments that an improved precision below one microsecond is possible in the given setups. It is also experimentally demonstrated that the stochastic nature of coupling is a key ingredient for convergence to synchrony. The proposed scheme can be applied in wireless systems for distributed synchronization of transmission slots, or sleep cycles.