On clock offset and skew estimation with exponentially distributed delays

This paper investigates the problem of clock synchronization of nodes in a wireless sensor network based on the two-way timing message exchange mechanism with an unknown deterministic transmission delay and random exponential transmission delays. Without knowing the fixed delay, a novel synchronization scheme is proposed for the linear clock model, which works well in both symmetric and asymmetric links. In the proposed algorithm, the clock skew and offset are estimated by directly utilizing mean square error as the metric to be optimized. This consideration results in significant performance improvements compared to the existing synchronization methods, especially for a small number of observations and large standard deviation of the random delays.