Resilience Bounds of Sensing-Based Network Clock Synchronization

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the resilience of sensing-based network clock synchronization, establishing bounds on fault tolerance and providing guidelines for designing fault-tolerant systems with up to 12 nodes.

Contribution

It introduces a fault tolerance analysis for sensing-based synchronization, deriving lower and upper bounds on the number of faults the system can handle.

Findings

Lower bound of fault tolerance for up to 12 nodes

Faults can be identified and corrected if within bounds

System cannot tolerate more than N-2 faults

Abstract

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.