Poster Abstract: C-Sync: The Resilient Time Synchronization Protocol

Nitin Shivaraman, Patrick Schuster, Saravanan Ramanathan, Arvind Easwaran, Sebastian Steinhorst

Abstract: Time synchronization is paramount for communication in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Existing synchronization protocols in the IoT are designed to be accurate, energy-efficient and scalable with absolute trust on the time source(s). If a byzantine node becomes a time source, it can cause synchronization errors with false time, leading to system mal-functions or network crashes. In this paper, we introduce C-Sync: a clustering time synchronization protocol for decentralized IoT networks that incorporates resilience against byzantine nodes. We show that C-sync achieves a worst-case synchronization accuracy of a few tens of microseconds (µs).