Motivation

Traditionally, time synchronization has been done over highly precise Ethernet communications. Ethernet allows for consistent transit time and is a generally reliable connection. However, as the world shifts to wireless devices, it has become apparent that it is challenging to get two devices to time sync over more unreliable or imprecise channels such as BLE. Currently published work on wireless time synchronization typically use custom boards, which allows researchers to get impressive results but does not allow the public to take advantage of this work.

The goal of this project is to produce a library that can be used to synchronize two device's clocks with one another over an unreliable communication channel, such as BLE or WiFi. This will involve exploiting the BLE stack in hardware to obtain accurate BLE timestamps, then using a time sync protocol to perform the synchronization. We intend to use a commonly used and well documented hardware platform and publish our results as free and open source for public use.