Comparison of Time Synchronization Techniques in a Distributed Collaborative Swarm System

Vincent Autefage (1) , Serge Chaumette (1) , Damien Magoni (1)

1 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique

Time drift in distributed systems is an important issue especially for mobile ad-hoc networks. Indeed, it can break the synchronization between the internal clocks of the nodes. Consequently, protocols over such networks should consider this problem in the case where they need to use time information. In this paper, we define a new collaborative system for autonomous mobile robots called AMiRALE. We present three versions of this system each with different time constraints. We provide its theoretical description as well as simulation results according to a park cleaning scenario. Results show that time synchronization has a limited impact on the efficiency of our collaborative system.

Mots clés: Time synchronization; Autonomous network; Mobile network; Distributed system; Collaboration

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]; Informatique mobile; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Vincent Autefage, Serge Chaumette, Damien Magoni. Comparison of Time Synchronization Techniques in a Distributed Collaborative Swarm System. Proceedings of the 24th European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC 2015), Jun 2015, Paris, France. pp.460-464, ⟨10.1109/EuCNC.2015.7194117⟩. ⟨hal-01175875⟩