Efficient time synchronization in a wireless sensor network by adaptive value tracking

Abstract

A desirable flooding-based time synchronization pro- tocol inWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) should neither demand fast propagation of up-to-date time information nor keeping track of the neighboring nodes. Moreover, such a protocol is strictly re- quired to have lowcomputational and communication overhead as well as small memory footprint.Would there be a protocol which meets these requirements' We answer this question positively by introducing a novel time synchronization protocol whose main component is ?adaptive-value tracking?. Thanks to this compo- nent, each sensor node synchronizes the rate of its clock to that of a reference clock through successive feedbackswith a considerably lowcomputational and memory overhead. By adjusting time offset of the rate-synchronized clocks, the network-wide synchronization is established even without demanding rapid propagation of the reference clock and keeping track of the neighboring nodes. In the light of our experimental evaluation in a testbed of 20 MICAz sensor nodes, we observed that the proposed protocol provides similar synchronization under the same communication frequency with an approximately 97% less CPU overhead and 80% less memory allocation compared to the recent flooding based time synchronization protocols in WSNs.

Publication
IEEE Transaction on Wireless Communications

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