Accurate and robust time reconstruction for deployed sensor networks

Abstract

The notion of global time is of great importance for many sensor network applications. To achieve microsecond accuracy, MAC-level timestamping is required for recording packet transmission and reception times. The MAC-level timestamps, however, are known to be error-prone, especially with low power listening techniques. In this paper, we propose ART, an accurate and robust time reconstruction approach to detecting invalid timestamps and recovering the needed information. We evaluate our approach in both testbed and a real-world deployment. Results show ART is accurate and robust for deployed sensor networks.