Michael W Trinh

US Patent:

20070058564, Mar 15, 2007

Filed:

Jul 21, 2006

Appl. No.:

11/491420

Inventors:

Ashok Agrawala - Ashton MD, US
Michael Trinh - Rockville MD, US

Assignee:

University of Maryland - College Park MD

International Classification:

H04L 12/26
H04J 1/16

US Classification:

370252000

Abstract:

A Cyclone Network Synchronization algorithm is presented that does not depend on highly stable and expensive clocks or hardware, yet it can synchronize nodes in a network with a very high degree of accuracy. It is very light-weight since no clock synchronization is performed, and subsequently does not incur any overhead in message passing. Instead, synchronization is done solely by listening to the regular network traffic. Finally, the amount of padding or time overhead incurred by the CNS algorithm is extremely small, even when used with system clocks that have high drift rates (e.g. 1000 PPM or more).