Reference interpolation protocol for time synchronization in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Advance in processor, memory and wireless communication technique have led to an increase of economical and small wireless sensor nodes. To provide the right responses quickly for the diverse events, wireless sensor nodes have cooperation with together. For successful cooperation, the time synchronization among sensor nodes is an important requirement for application execution. In wireless sensor networks, message packets are used for the time synchronization. However, the transmission of message packets dissipates the battery energy of wireless sensor nodes. Since wireless sensor nodes works on the limited battery capacity, the excessive use of message packets has a negative impact upon their lifetime. In this paper, reference interpolation protocol is proposed for reducing the number of message packets for the time synchronization. The proposed method performs time interpolation between the time of reference packets and the global time of the base station. The proposed method completes the synchronization operation with only two message packets. Due to the simple synchronization procedure, our method greatly reduces the number of synchronization messages. From the decrease in the transmission of message packets, the convergence time among wireless sensor nodes is shortened and the lifetime of wireless sensor nodes is also prolonged as much as the amount of saved battery energy. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.