Self-synchronization of Nonidentical Machines in Machine-to-Machine Systems

The notion of common time is very important information in distributed systems (e.g., for maintaining the consistency of distributed data). Namely, due to the lack of global time and imperfections (e.g., skew) of physical clocks, in order to agree on common time, distributed nodes have to synchronize themselves. Imperfections of physical clocks are even more emphasized in heterogeneous distributed systems called Machine-to-Machine (M2M) systems in which communication refers to the communication among no identical machines that communicate using different types of communication technologies without, or with limited human intervention.