SLTP: Scalable lightweight time synchronization protocol for wireless sensor network

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, time synchronization is a critical problem. In this paper, we propose SLTP, a Scalable Lightweight Time-synchronization Protocol for wireless sensor networks. By using passive clustering and linear regression SLTP can reduce the energy consumption of network nodes and also decrease the overhead of creating and maintaining the clusters. Moreover SLTP uses linear regression to compute the time. Therefore, it can calculate the clock skew and offset between each node and its cluster head in order to estimate the local time of remote nodes in the future or the past. Simulation results show that by this we can gain considerable improvements in power consumption, accuracy and scalability in comparison to similar algorithms. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.