Two-hop time synchronization protocol for sensor networks

Abstract

One of the critical middleware services for sensor networks is the time synchronization, which provides supports to different applications. Synchronization protocols used for Internet and LANs are not appropriate in the sensor networks for the high-density and limited energy resource. This paper describes two-hop time synchronization (TTS) that aims at reducing the synchronization overhead and providing more accurate network-wide synchronization. The synchronization message exchanges are minimized by making full use of sensors' broadcast domain and enlarging the common node synchronization range in multi-hop scenarios. By halving synchronization hops, the TTS achieves high multi-hop synchronization precision. The proposed protocol contains single-hop synchronization model, multi-hop synchronization algorithm, and a power control scheme. We prove that the extension of single-hop TTS to network-wide synchronization is NP-complete. The complexity and convergence time of multi-hop TTS are analyzed in detail. We simulate TTS on MATLAB and show that it requires minimal overhead and convergence time compared with other protocols. We also implement TTS on common sensors and its multi-hop synchronization error is less than that of receiver-receiver synchronization (R-RS).

A Novel Cluster Based Time Synchronization Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…The simulation has been performed in MATLAB 2013a. The performance of CBTS protocol is compared with TPSN [15] and TTS [18] protocols. The performance metrics include the number of nodes in the WSN, initial energy of the SNs, total number of messages per synchronization round, total energy dissipation per synchronization round, propagated synchronization error and convergence time.…”

“…In wireless sensor networks, a lot of research [10]- [31] has already been carried out to design time synchronization protocols such as Reference Broadcast Synchronization (RBS) [11], Romer synchronization [13], TPSN (Timing Sync Protocols for Sensors Networks) [15], Two-hop time synchronization protocol for sensor networks (TTS) [18], Fast distributed multi-hop relative time synchronization protocol and estimators for wireless sensor networks [19], Long term and large scale time synchronization in wireless sensor networks (2LTSP) [20], and Average time synchronization in wireless sensor networks by pairwise messages (ATSP) [21], Time synchronization protocol based on spanning tree [28], Lightweight and Energy Efficient Time Synchronization (LEETS) Protocols [29] and Lightweight Fault-tolerant Time synchronization [30]. Some of these protocols synchronize the nodes internally by placing the nodes on common notion of time and some synchronize externally by using large number of messages to adjust the clocks of the sensor nodes with global clock.…”

Controlled Mobility Time Synchronization for WSNs

“…Initially the performance of proposed algorithms has been compared with each other, and then compared with Tow-hop time synchronization (TTS) [27], Average Time Synchronization (ATS) [29] and Timing sync protocols for sensor networks (TPSN). The performance evaluation includes message exchange, energy consumption, skew error rate and synchronization delay.…”

OTSA: Optimized Time Synchronization Approach for Delay-based Energy Efficient Routing in WSN

“…The author had presented the work in the form of mathematical modelling and graph theory to find reduced synchronization error as an outcome. Wang et al [13] have presented a mechanism that can perform synchronization of time along with supportability of multi-hop communication in sensor network. The author have perform rectification of time synchronization problems on two hops for minimizing an adverse effect of overhead and furnishing seamless synchronization to all nodes in dynamic networks.…”