Natural Timestamping Using Powerline Electromagnetic Radiation

Abstract

The continuous fluctuation of electric network frequency (ENF) presents a fingerprint indicative of time, which we call natural timestamp. This paper studies the time accuracy of these natural timestamps obtained from powerline electromagnetic radiation (EMR), which is mainly excited by powerline voltage oscillations at the rate of the ENF. However, since the EMR signal is often weak and noisy, extracting the ENF is challenging, especially on resource-limited sensor platforms. We design an efficient EMR conditioning algorithm and evaluate the time accuracy of EMR natural timestamps on two representative classes of IoT platforms -- a high-end single-board computer with a customized EMR antenna and a low-end mote with a normal conductor wire acting as EMR antenna. Extensive measurements at five sites in a city, which are away from each other for up to 24 km, show that the high-end and low-end nodes achieve median time errors of about 50 ms and 150 ms, respectively. To demonstrate the use of the EMR natural timestamps, we discuss two applications, namely time recovery and run-time clock verification.