Poster: environment-adaptive clock calibration for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel clock calibration approach, which addresses two key challenges for clock calibration in Wireless Sensor Networks: excessive communication overhead and the trade-off between accuracy and cost. To achieve this, our approach leverages the fact that the clock skew is highly correlated to temperature, which can serve as both an assistant for clock skew estimation and a regulatory factor for the duty-cycled design. Our approach is one order of magnitude more power-efficient than communication based approaches since the calibration largely relies on local temperature information. In addition, our approach provides a nice feature of self-adaptive period, which can substantially promote the system flexibility. We present the theory behind our approach, and provide preliminary results of a simulated comparison of our approach and some recent approaches.