Sensor network serial communication system with high tolerance to timing and topology variations

This article presents the first wireline sensor network to use the delay window clock and data recovery (CDR) algorithm, which allows network nodes to communicate without high precision embedded clocks or a global clock. Changes in the topology of the network caused the transmission rates of the sensor nodes to vary. The mean data period measured on the network ranged from 738.79 ns to 811.25 ns and the standard deviation of periodic jitter (PJ) ranged from 0.7640 ns to 24.01 ns, depending on topology. Data sent from the sensor nodes was successfully recovered for all test cases without modifying the CDR, despite high PJ.