Tri-Message: A Lightweight Time Synchronization Protocol for High Latency and Resource-Constrained Networks

Existing terrestrial synchronization protocols including RBS, FTSP, TPSN, LTS and TSHL have already achieved high precision in radio networks, but none of them perform well in high latency networks like acoustic sensor networks. In this paper, we present tri-message: a lightweight time synchronization protocol for high latency and resource-constrained networks. As its name suggests, only three message exchanges are required in one synchronization process. Meanwhile, tri-message utilizes very simple mathematical operations to calculate the clock skew and offset. Specially, tri-message is feasible for many extremely long latency applications such as space exploration because it has an increasing synchronization precision with the increasement of distance.