Recent advances in nanotechnology, electronic technology and biology have enabled the development of bio-inspired nanoscale sensors. The cooperation among the bionanosensors in a network is envisioned to perform complex tasks. Clock synchronization is essential to establish diffusion-based distributed cooperation in the bionanosensor networks. This paper proposes a maximum-likelihood estimator of the clock offset for the clock synchronization among molecular bionanosensors. The unique properties of diffusion-based molecular communication are described. Based on the inverse Gaussian distribution of the molecular propagation delay, a two-way message exchange mechanism for clock synchronization is proposed. The maximum-likelihood estimator of the clock offset is derived. The convergence and the bias of the estimator are analyzed. The simulation results show that the proposed estimator is effective for the offset compensation required for clock synchronization. This work paves the way for the cooperation of nanomachines in diffusion-based bionanosensor networks.
Keywords: bionanosensor networks; clock synchronization; diffusion; molecular communication.