A randomized linear algorithm for clock synchronization in multi-agent systems

In this paper a randomized linear protocol for time synchronization of clocks in a multi-agent scenario is considered. Clocks are allowed to have different offsets and different rates, and they communicate through an asymmetric broadcast protocol. The contribution of this paper is twofold. It is first shown that, under very mild conditions on the communication graph, it is possible to tune a protocol parameter in such a way that synchronization is achieved in mean-square. Then, via numerical simulations, the proposed strategy is compared with other fully distributed strategies recently proposed in the literature. While being slightly slower to reach the asymptotic synchronization, the proposed strategy significantly outperforms the other strategies in terms of robustness against process and measurement noises and time-varying clock drifts.