Communication networks are often designed and analyzed assuming tight synchronization among nodes. However, in applications that require communication in the energy-efficient regime of low signal-to-noise ratios, establishing tight synchronization among nodes in the network can result in a significant energy overhead. Motivated by a recent result showing that near-optimal energy efficiency can be achieved over the AWGN channel without requiring tight synchronization, we consider the question of whether the potential gains of cooperative communication can be achieved in the absence of synchronization. We focus on the symmetric Gaussian diamond network and establish that cooperative-communication gains are indeed feasible even with unsynchronized nodes. More precisely, we show that the capacity per unit energy of the unsynchronized symmetric Gaussian diamond network is within a constant factor of the capacity per unit energy of the corresponding synchronized network. To this end, we propose a distributed relaying scheme that does not require tight synchronization but nevertheless achieves most of the energy gains of coherent combining.
Different types of synchronization errors have been considered in the literature. Insertion deletion channels as used in this paper model clock drift and jitter at the symbol level. A different approach is to assume that the clocks at different nodes only differ by a constant offset with respect to each other. For such errors, the offset is typically either assumed to be equal to a multiple of the symbol interval (frame asynchronism @cite_2 ) or equal to a length less than one symbol interval (symbol asynchronism). The multiple-access channel capacity region under symbol asynchronism and frame asynchronism has been analyzed in @cite_19 and @cite_11 @cite_8 , respectively. Several recent works, @cite_13 and @cite_21 , address the energy efficiency of bursty data communication. Here, asynchronism is not in the sense of symbol or frame asynchronism as described above, but in the sense that data arrives at the source sporadically at some random time unknown beforehand.
@cite_8 @cite_21 @cite_19 @cite_2 @cite_13 @cite_11
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An equivalent discrete-time Gaussian channel parametrized by the signal cross-correlations is derived to obtain an equivalent channel model with discrete-time outputs. The main feature introduced by the lack of symbol synchronism is that the channel has memory. This is due to the overlap of each symbol transmitted by a user with two consecutive symbols transmitted by the other user. It is shown that if the transmitters are assigned the same waveform, symbol asynchronism has no effect on the two-user capacity region of the white Gaussian channel which is equal to the Cover-Syner pentagon, whereas if the assigned waveforms are different (e.g., code division multiple access), the symbol-asynchronous capacity region is no longer a pentagon. An alternative representation of the capacity region which results in a particularly compact characterization of the fundamental limits of the multiple-access channel in the region of signal-to-noise ratios is also considered. > We study memoryless channels with synchronization errors as defined by a stochastic channel matrix allowing for symbol drop-outs or symbol insertions with particular emphasis on the binary and non-binary deletion channels. We offer a different look at these channels by considering equivalent models by fragmenting the input sequence where different subsequences travel through different channels. The resulting output symbols are combined appropriately to come up with an equivalent input-output representation of the original channel which allows for derivation of new upper bounds on the channel capacity. We consider both random and deterministic types of fragmentation processes applied to binary and nonbinary deletion channels. With two specific applications of this idea, a random fragmentation applied to a binary deletion channel and a deterministic fragmentation process applied to a nonbinary deletion channel, we prove certain inequality relations among the capacities of the original channels and those of the introduced subchannels. The resulting inequalities prove useful in deriving tighter capacity upper bounds for: 1) independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) deletion channels when the deletion probability exceeds 0.65 and 2) nonbinary deletion channels. Some extensions of these results, for instance, to the case of deletion substitution channels are also explored. We introduce the continuous time asynchronous channel as a model for time jitter in a communication system with no common clock between the transmitter and the receiver. We have obtained a simple characterization for an optimal zero-error self-synchronizable code for the asynchronous channel. The capacity of this channel is determined by both a combinatorial approach and a probabilistic approach. Our results unveil the somewhat surprising fact that it is not necessary for the receiver clock to resynchronize with the transmitter clock within a fixed maximum time in order to achieve reliable communication. This means that no upper limit should be imposed on the run lengths of the self-synchronization code as in the case of run-length limited (RLL) codes which are commonly used in magnetic recording. Recent advances in miniaturization and low-cost, low-power design have led to active research in large-scale networks of small, wireless, low-power sensors and actuators. Time synchronization is critical in sensor networks for diverse purposes including sensor data fusion, coordinated actuation, and power-efficient duty cycling. Though the clock accuracy and precision requirements are often stricter than in traditional distributed systems, strict energy constraints limit the resources available to meet these goals.We present Reference-Broadcast Synchronization, a scheme in which nodes send reference beacons to their neighbors using physical-layer broadcasts. A reference broadcast does not contain an explicit timestamp; instead, receivers use its arrival time as a point of reference for comparing their clocks. In this paper, we use measurements from two wireless implementations to show that removing the sender's nondeterminism from the critical path in this way produces high-precision clock agreement (1.85 ± 1.28μsec, using off-the-shelf 802.11 wireless Ethernet), while using minimal energy. We also describe a novel algorithm that uses this same broadcast property to federate clocks across broadcast domains with a slow decay in precision (3.68 ± 2.57μsec after 4 hops). RBS can be used without external references, forming a precise relative timescale, or can maintain microsecond-level synchronization to an external timescale such as UTC. We show a significant improvement over the Network Time Protocol (NTP) under similar conditions.