Patent 7418650 was granted and assigned to NXP LPC on August, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
In order to carry out in a communication system (1) a temporal synchronization of clocks in a particularly rapid and efficient manner, a method is proposed which has the following steps: acquiring state values which are dependent on a time base (10); filing each acquired state value at a position in a first list L comprising (k+1) positions, if the acquired state value is smaller than or equal to the (k+1) smallest element of the list L, where k is a predefinable error tolerance; filing the acquired state value at a position in a second list H comprising (k+1) positions, if the acquired state value is greater than or equal to the (k+1) greatest element of the list H; forming a mean value from the (k+1) smallest element of the list L and the (k+1) greatest element of the list H, if the number of acquired state values is greater than or equal to (2k+2); determining a correction value as a function of the mean value; and correcting a current state value of the clocks that are to be synchronized.