Single-Timestamp Skew Correction (STSC) in V2X Networks

Abstract

Modern vehicles nowadays have many capabilities apart from the basic function of driving. These are now intelligent, smart, and can communicate over the Internet. A vehicle-to-everything (V2X) wireless network represents a network where vehicles communicate vital sensor data with other vehicles, pedestrians, and fixed infrastructure over the internet. There are various challenges in V2X communication that may affect the efficiency of autonomous devices, systems, and infrastructure. Of the many challenges, time synchronization among many devices in V2X networks is a key challenge. In a V2X network, all nodes within the network need to be time-synchronized; this is essential for task scheduling, computation off-loading, event sequencing, resource sharing, and efficient utilization of resources in the network. In recent works, many researchers have addressed time synchronization in V2X networks by considering multiple timestamps in order to estimate the time skew offset with varying results. In this paper, we consider a skew-based approach, namely, a single-timestamp skew correction (STSC) for time synchronization in V2X networks. The proposed method needs a single timestamp to estimate time skew at the hardware level with the help of physical-layer time synchronization using symbol timing recovery. Implementation results prove that the STSC accurately synchronizes the nodes in phase and frequency, therefore resulting in a greater accuracy and better energy savings in the V2X networks.