Pairwise Broadcast Clock Synchronization for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes an energy-efficient clock synchronization scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) based on a novel time synchronization approach. Within the proposed synchronization approach, a subset of sensor nodes are synchronized by over-hearing the timing message exchanges of a pair of sensor nodes. Therefore, a group of sensor nodes can be synchronized without sending any extra messages. This paper brings two main contributions: 1. Development of a novel synchronization approach which can be partially or fully applied for implementation of new synchronization protocols and for improving the performance ofexisting time synchronization protocols. 2. Design of a time synchronization scheme which significantly reduces the overall network-wide energy consumption without incurring any loss of synchronization accuracy compared to other well-known schemes.