Application-Layer Clock Synchronization for Wearables Using Skin Electric Potentials Induced by Powerline Radiation

TL;DR

TouchSync is a novel indoor clock synchronization method for wearables that leverages skin electric potentials induced by powerline radiation, achieving millisecond accuracy using only standard system calls.

Contribution

It introduces a universal synchronization approach that uses skin electric potentials and fuses multiple rounds to resolve ambiguity, avoiding hardware-dependent timestamping.

Findings

Synchronization errors below 3 ms on the same wearer

Errors below 7 ms between wearers 10 km apart

Compatible with standard system calls and wearable platforms

Abstract

Design of clock synchronization for networked nodes faces a fundamental trade-off between synchronization accuracy and universality for heterogeneous platforms, because a high synchronization accuracy generally requires platform-dependent hardware-level network packet timestamping. This paper presents TouchSync, a new indoor clock synchronization approach for wearables that achieves millisecond accuracy while preserving universality in that it uses standard system calls only, such as reading system clock, sampling sensors, and sending/receiving network messages. The design of TouchSync is driven by a key finding from our extensive measurements that the skin electric potentials (SEPs) induced by powerline radiation are salient, periodic, and synchronous on a same wearer and even across different wearers. TouchSync integrates the SEP signal into the universal principle of Network Time Protocol and solves an integer ambiguity problem by fusing the ambiguous results in multiple synchronization rounds to conclude an accurate clock offset between two synchronizing wearables. With our shared code, TouchSync can be readily integrated into any wearable applications. Extensive evaluation based on our Arduino and TinyOS implementations shows that TouchSync's synchronization errors are below 3 and 7 milliseconds on the same wearer and between two wearers 10 kilometers apart, respectively.