Rapid growth in wireless communication systems motivates the development of technology supporting the simulation of large-scale wireless systems. However, it is widely recognized that wireless communications do not have substantial "lookahead" needed by conservative synchronization protocols. This paper focuses on identifying and exploiting lookahead for such models. We find lookahead in three ways, exploiting characteristics of low power networks, the transceiver logic, and the way in which protocol stacks are typically constructed. We show how these observations allow a variety of conservative synchronization protocols to take advantage of lookahead, describe a synchronization method we use, and empirically examine the performance this method offers on a large-scale simulation of a sensor network intended for homeland defense scenarios.
