Convergence and performance analysis of leaderless synchronization in Wi-Fi networks

Abstract

This work addresses synchronization in multi-hop wireless access networks, with the main but not exclusive purpose of providing end-to-end Quality of Service by time-based scheduling. In these networks all nodes require a common notion of time in order to deploy a common time reference structure and to locate themselves therein. Although nodes can be synchronized with an external and absolute time reference, as provided by a global navigation satellite system, this work focuses on a distributed synchronization solution exploiting local time information at each node. The convergence and performance analysis of a consensus-based solution called Leaderless Time Synchronization Protocol (LTSP) is presented considering different sources of synchronization errors.