Theoretical and Practical Bounds on the Initial Value of Clock Skew Compensation Algorithm Immune to Floating-Point Precision Loss for Resource-Constrained Wireless Sensor Nodes

In this paper, we revisit our prior work on clock skew compensation immune to floating-point precision loss and provide practical as well as theoretical bounds on the initial value of the skew-compensated clock based on a systematic analysis of the errors of floating-point operations; by practical bounds, we mean the actual values of the theoretical bounds from the systematic analysis calculated at resource-constrained computing platforms like battery-powered, low-cost wireless sensor nodes equipped with the 32-bit single-precision floating-point format. The numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed practical bounds based on single-precision floating-point format do not violate the theoretical bounds and thereby can guarantee the correctness of the clock skew compensation even on resource-constrained computing platforms.