Enhanced time synchronization protocol for wireless sensor and actuator network

Abstract

Time synchronization is one of the critical and elementary issues that need to be solved in a wireless sensor and actuator network so that all the nodes and actuators can share the same time notion and then cooperate seamlessly. In this paper, an enhanced control-theoretic distributed time synchronization protocol, which utilized sliding mode control and PID control to achieve the convergence is introduced, investigated and compared with existing protocols in literature. As a result, the introduced time synchronization protocol shows convincing results. The protocol can converge in finite time and has the lowest cumulative integral errors among the compared protocols.