A time synchronization method for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

As consistent time scale is essential to facilitate group operations and improve network performance, time synchronization is regard as a critical piece of infrastructure for distributed network measurement and control systems, especially for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, existing time synchronization algorithms for WSNs either do not provide enough scalability to achieve compatibility with other sync protocols, or do not fully take into account the characteristics of WSNs. This paper proposes a time synchronization method (TSM) to achieve precise time synchronization and reach the frequency drift compensation in WSNs at the same time. Evaluations show that TSM synchronizes wireless sensor nodes precisely with a magnitude of microsecond. Moreover, it has a good performance of stability and energy efficient. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.