Energy-balanced Time Synchronization Algorithm Based on Flooding for Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

To achieve network-wide time synchronization in multi-hop wireless sensor networks (WSN), this paper proposes an accurate and energy-balanced time synchronization algorithm based on flooding. Flooding Time-Synchronization Protocol (FTSP) has advanced features, such as implicitly dynamic topology and high time accuracy, which can't be affected by some node's losing. FTSP propagates its time information of the reference node without concern about the network topology. However, in large-scale WSN applications, the efficiency of FTSP will be reduced drastically because of serious network storm. Meanwhile, the energy consumption of the network breaks the energy balance. In this paper, our aim is to solve the problems of synchronization error accumulation and unbalanced energy consumption. Our theoretical findings and experimental results show that forbidding possibly invalid forwarding among the sensor nodes drastically improves the synchronization accuracy and performance of energy-balanced.