Data-Driven Synchronization for Internet-of-Things Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is fueled by the growth of sensors, actuators, and services that collect and process raw sensor data. Wearable and environmental sensors will be a major component of the IoT and provide context about people and activities that are occurring. It is imperative that sensors in the IoT are synchronized, which increases the usefulness and value of the sensor data and allows data from multiple sources to be combined and compared. Due to the heterogeneous nature of sensors (e.g., synchronization protocols, communication channels, etc.), synchronization can be difficult. In this article, we present novel techniques for synchronizing data from multi-sensor environments based on the events and interactions measured by the sensors. We present methods to determine which interactions can likely be used for synchronization and methods to improve synchronization by removing erroneous synchronization points. We validate our technique through experiments with wearable and environmental sensors in a laboratory environment. Experiments resulted in median drift error reduction from 66% to 98% for sensors synchronized through physical interactions.