Elapsed time on arrival: a simple and versatile primitive for canonical time synchronisation services

Time synchronisation is one of the most important and fundamental middleware for wireless sensor networks. However, there is an apparent disconnect between existing synchronisation implementations and the actual needs of current typical sensor network. To address this problem, we formulate a set of canonical time synchronisation distilled from actual applications and propose a set of general application programming for providing them. We argue that these services can be implemented using a simple -stamping primitive called Elapsed Time on Arrival (ETA) and we provide two such. The Routing Integrated Time Synchronisation (RITS) is an extension of ETA multiple hops. It is a reactive time synchronisation protocol that can be used to correlate event detections at one or more locations to within microseconds. Rapid Time (RATS) is a proactive timesync protocol that utilises RITS to achieve -wide synchronisation with microsecond precision and rapid convergence. Our work that it is possible to build high-performance timesync services using the simple primitive and suggests that more complex mechanisms may be unnecessary to meet the of many real world sensor network applications.