Stochastic power controls for distributed pulse-coupled synchronization

This paper is primarily intended to focus on some fundamental and challenging questions pertaining to physical-layer synchronization among clock pulse signals received from a large-scale wireless network with delayed clock information and delayed disagreement information in the neighborhood. The technical approach, which is based on time-varying graph and systems-theoretic foundations as well as the Minimal-Cost-Variance control theory, will investigate distributed power control at each clock for not only achieving efficient global synchronization but also reducing total energy consumption. In essence, the distributed pulse-coupled synchronization considered will enable individual clocks to select local views by the Bernoulli distributions while minimizing the number of attempts to read remote clocks. As the result, stochastic power weight laws as supported by the minimal-cost-variance control paradigm, require communications between neighboring clocks only at certain sampling points rather than at all times for assured quality and energy efficiency of timing synchronization. If successful, the proposed technique is expected to pave new ways for new theoretical studies on time and frequency synchronization in cooperative wireless networks and even for asynchronous network communications.