Clock synchronization is critical for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) due to the need of inter-node coordination and collaborative information processing. Although many message passing protocols can achieve satisfactory clock synchronization accuracy, they incur prohibitively high overhead when the network scales to more than tens of nodes. An alternative approach is to take advantage of the global time reference induced by existing infrastructures including GPS, timekeeping radio stations, or power grid. However, high power consumption and geographic constraints present them from being widely adopted in WSNs. In this paper, we propose ROCS, a new clock synchronization approach exploiting the Radio Data System (RDS) of FM radios. First, we design a new hardware FM receiver that can extract a periodic pulse from FM broadcasts, referred to as RDS clock. We then conduct a large-scale measurement study of RDS clock in our lab for a period of six days and on a vehicle driving through a metropolitan area of over 40 km 2 . Our results show that RDS clock is highly stable and hence is a viable means to calibrate the clocks of large-scale city-wide sensor networks. To reduce the high power consumption of FM receiver, ROCS intelligently predicts the time error due to drift, and adaptively calibrates the native clock via the RDS clock. We implement ROCS in TinyOS on our hardware FM receiver and a TelosB-compatible WSN platform. Our extensive experiments using a 12-node testbed and our driving measurement traces show that ROCS achieves accurate and precise clock synchronization with low power consumption.

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A plethora of studies on self-organization has been carried out in broad areas including chemistry, biology, astronomy, medical science, telecommunications, etc., in both academia and industry. Following the studies on swarm intelligence observed in social species, the artificial self-organized systems are expected to exhibit some intelligent features (e.g., flexibility, robustness, decentralized control, self-evolution, etc.) that may have made social species so successful in the biosphere. In this paper, the application of swarm intelligence in communications networks will be studied, and we survey different aspects of bio-inspired mechanisms and examine various algorithms that have been proposed to improve the performance of artificial systems. Some fundamental self-organized networking (SON) mechanisms, designing principles and optimization approaches for artificial systems will then be investigated, followed by some well-known bio-inspired algorithms (e.g., cooperation, division of labor, distributed network synchronization, load balancing, etc.) as well as their applications to the maintenance/operation/optimization of artificial systems being analyzed. Besides, some new emerging technologies, such as the Self-X capabilities and cognitive machine-to-machine (M2M) optimization for the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE)/LTE-Advanced systems, are also surveyed. Finally, the remaining challenges to be faced in designing the future heterogeneous systems will be discussed.