Resilience Bounds of Sensing-Based Network Clock Synchronization

Recent studies exploited external periodic synchronous signals to synchronize a pair of network nodes to address a threat of delaying the communications between the nodes. However, the sensing-based synchronization may yield faults due to nonmalicious signal and sensor noises. This paper considers a system of $N$ nodes that will fuse their peer-to-peer synchronization results to correct the faults. Our analysis gives the lower bound of the number of faults that the system can tolerate when $N$ is up to 12. If the number of faults is no greater than the lower bound, the faults can be identified and corrected. We also prove that the system cannot tolerate more than $N$ − 2 faults. Our results can guide the design of resilient sensing-based clock synchronization systems.

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