Low-Power Scheduling for Time Synchronization Protocols in A Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Time synchronization is a fundamental problem in wireless sensor networks. Practically, wireless sensor networks require a scalable time synchronization mechanism to wake up the sensor nodes at specific scheduled times. It helps accomplish coordinated communications among the nodes to save energy. We introduce low-power scheduling for time synchronization (LPSS) protocols; LPSS minimizes the scheduling communication overhead, reduces the power consumption, and accelerates the scheduling process. This article demonstrates that LPSS achieves substantially fewer messages and less delay in the scheduling process than the previous techniques, fast scheduling and accurate drift compensation for time synchronization (FADS), and density-table-based synchronization (DTSync). Simulation results show, for a large network, that LPSS reduces the number of messages by 12 times compared to FADS and DTSync. Moreover, LPSS achieves less delay by 10 and 31 times compared to FADS and DTSync, respectively.