Design and experimental evaluation of a distributed time synchronization technique for multi-hop wireless sensor networks

Abstract

All communications networks, in general, and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), in particular, need time synchronization for fulfilling the stringent requirements of the services they are providing. Time synchronization in WSNs is needed for multiple purposes (e.g., sleep-wakeup scheduling, event detection annotation). In literature, various time synchronization protocols for WSNs are proposed and some of these designs are evaluated in experimental testbeds. However, multi-hop time synchronization in WSNs have never been investigated experimentally. Therefore, to fill the gap in the WSN literature, in this study, we present the design and implementation of a novel time synchronization technique. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of the proposed technique through direct experimentation. Our results reveal the superior performance of our technique.