An Energy-Efficient Synchronization Scheme for Multi-hop WSNs through Passive Listening

Abstract

Energy Conservation in Wireless Sensor Networks(WSNs) has emerged as challenging research in recenttimes. Considering the limited energy of batteries of sensor nodes, it is requiredto synchronize the nodes of a multi-hop WSN with as less energy as possible.Recently a hybrid synchronization scheme is proposed for practical WSNs,which is a combination of one way message dissemination and time-stamp freesynchronization. Passive listening can be employed additionally in the hybridapproach. In this work, we propose an energy efficient synchronizing scheme to synchronize every node of a multi-hop WSN. The proposed scheme, which minimizes energy consumption and lowers communication overhead, is a hybrid combination of passive listening based time-stamp free synchronization and one-way message dissemination. We derive MSE, CRLB of the estimates of clock skew and offset and observe that the proposed scheme is energy efficient in synchronizing n number of nodes of a multi-hop WSN compared to the existing scheme.