| Recent advances in micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology have opened up the
possibility to design low-power low-cost smart sensors that are equipped with multiple onboard functions: sensing, computing and communications. Such intelligent devices networked through wireless links have been recognized as one of the most important technologies for the 21st century. Wireless sensor networks hold the promise to revolutionize the sensing technology for a broad spectrum of applications: infrastructure monitoring and surveillance, disaster
management etc.
The need for synchronized time arises
as a very valuable tool for intra-network coordination among various sensors (e.g., distributive communication protocols, temporal
coordination of the power-saving sleep/wake-up modes, localization of sensors), and for obtaining a coordinated interaction between the
sensor network and the physical real world (e.g., data fusion, distributed tracking, monitoring and control). At present, there is
a major need for analytical techniques to quantify how the clock synchronization errors accumulate across wireless sensor networks,
for designing high-performance and robust synchronization techniques that achieve the optimum levels of accuracy, delay and power
consumption, and for developing energy-efficient protocols to ensure long-term synchronization of sensor networks.
The aim of this paper is to provide a
unifying analytical framework to assess the performance of reference broadcast synchronization (RBS) protocol assuming an exponential delay traffic model, to establish analytical performance bounds, and to design energy-efficient synchronization algorithms that achieve these performance limits.
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| Erchin Serpedin received (with highest distinction) the Diploma of electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania, in 1991. He received the specialization degree in signal processing and transmission of information from Ecole Superieure D'Electricite, Paris, France, in 1992, the M.Sc. degree from Georgia Institute
of Technology, Atlanta, GA, in 1992, and the
Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, in January 1999. Dr. Serpedin is currently an associate professor at Texas A&M University, College Station. His research interests lie in the areas of statistical signal processing and wireless communications.
Dr. Serpedin has received the NSF (US National Science Foundation) Career Award in 2001,
the US National Research Council (NRC) Fellow Award in 2005, the ASEE (American Society for Engineering Education) Fellow Award in 2006, the CCCT 2005 Best Conference Paper Award, the TEES
Fellow Award, and the Outstanding Faculty Award in 2004. He is currently serving as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, the IEEE Transactions
on Signal Processing, the IEEE Communications Letters, IEEE Transactions on Communications and EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing.
He is also serving as a technical chair of the Globecom 2006 Conference. |