A Clock Synchronization Method for Molecular Nanomachines in Bionanosensor Networks

The recent advancements in nanotechnology, electronic technology, and biology enable bio-inspired nanosensors. Bionanosensor networks, which are composed of nanoscale devices, are envisioned to apply to a great number of potential applications. Clock synchronization is essential to establish a distributed cooperation among the bionanosensors. This paper investigates the clock synchronization issue among the bionanosensors in the presence of Gaussian propagation delay for their molecular communication mechanism. A two-way message exchange mechanism is proposed. The closed-form expressions of maximum-likelihood estimators for the clock offset and the clock skew are derived. The convergence and the Cramer-Rao lower bound of the estimators are analytically analyzed. Simulation results further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed estimators. This paper lays a foundation for the complex cooperation of nanomachines in the bionanosensor networks.