contrIbutIons And roAd MAP
Due to the architectural constraints, the key ideas of CheepSync are:
• Not to synchronize the nodes in the net-
work, but to make the devices that use these
nodes to synchronize
• Piggyback on the device mobility aspect (as
they are inevitably carried by people) and use them as “synchronization mules” for the “broadcast” system
Thus, it offers a flexible piggyback design wherein running the time service does not require data transactions to be temporarily suspended. There- fore, time synchronization with CheepSync is high- ly implicit rather than explicit. Since CheepSync rides on the BLE broadcast framework, it is scal- able to the point that the framework has to offer.
In this article, we describe our experiences in building a custom BLE beacon platform that uses BLE fakery over a general-purpose radio — a tool for conducting research in this direction — in the next section. It is followed by a detailed design and analysis of the CheepSync architec- ture and performance that is able to achieve an average time synchronization accuracy in the range of 10 s. The final sections provide a con- cise background of existing work in this related field, and we conclude with a summary of the areas covered in the article.