Software

 

Berkeley Motes

 

·        Mica 1[1]

 

We were able to obtain a accuracy of less than 20ms (microseconds) between a pair of Berkeley motes. We have also implemented RBS to gauge the relative performance between two schemes. TPSN roughly gives a 2x better performance than RBS.

To obtain multihop synchronization we have integrated TPSN with the approach of post facto synchronization. Due to the randomness in the sign and the magnitude of the error, the resulting error does not blow up. We were able to synchronize motes over a distance of 5 hops within an average accuracy of 25ms (microseconds).

By periodically synchronizing the motes we can increase the accuracy of TPSN. With this added capability, we were able to synchronize the pair of motes to an average accuracy of 5ms (microseconds).

 

Implementation details

The first task was to generate a lower granularity clock in motes. We were able to achieve a minimum granularity of 0.25ms (microseconds).

The second major modification needed was to incorporate the ability of time stamping the packets at the RFM layer (MAC layer). We were able to achieve this by creating an interface between the application layer and the RFM layer. More details can be obtained from the SenSys paper.

The following link contains all the source codes as well as the modified system files.

 

Source codes

 

TinyOS distribution incorporated with time synchronization using TPSN.

 

                              

·        Mica 2[2]

 

We have successfully ported the code on NESC and MICA2. We were able to obtain a accuracy of less than 10ms (microseconds) between a pair of Berkeley motes. We have also implemented RBS to gauge the relative performance between two schemes. TPSN roughly gives a 2x better performance than RBS.

Links to the detailed documentation and the source codes are as follows:

 

Documentation [DOC] [PDF].

 

TinyOS distribution[3]

 

TPSN on TinyOS 1.1 distribution (Newly added)

 

 

NESLsim

 

We have implemented TPSN on NESLsim, a parsec based simulation platform for sensor networks. This implementation was used to gauge the performance of TPSN on large-scale networks having nodes in the range of 150-300.

The results show that though error is a non-decreasing function of hop distance, it never blows up.

Further we concluded that synchronization error for a node is just the function of its hop distance from the root node. It is completely independent of the total number of nodes in the system. Thus it is the height and not the breadth of the hierarchical structure that is important to characterize the synchronization error for a node.

 

Source codes

 



[1] By Saurabh Ganeriwal (saurabh@ee.ucla.edu).

[2] By Ram Kumar (ram@ee.ucla.edu).

[3] This only contains the files that have been modified.