Energy efficient clustering for time synchronization in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

With recent technological advancement in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the use of wireless sensors in the fields like pollution monitoring, military applications, health applications, seismic study, under water study has increased rapidly. There are certain applications such as military, environmental and seismic which need time synchronization of the sensor nodes precisely to ensure the exact time of event. In WSNs each node has its own local clock which keeps on varying due to variation in the oscillator frequency. The oscillator frequency is time varying due to ambient conditions which leads to re-synchronization of nodes time and again. This re-synchronization process is energy consuming whereas the energy is the constraint in WSNs. This paper proposes a model of Energy Efficient Clustering for Time Synchronization (EECTS) for WSNs which ensures the synchronization of nodes in energy efficient manner by clustering the sensor nodes in a manner which leads to energy efficient time synchronization and the cluster head rotation is based on clock offset. The proposed model ensures that all the nodes remain globally synchronized by calculating the threshold limit of skew and ensure that nodes must remain within the limits of defined skew. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed Energy Efficient Clustering for Time Synchronization reduced the energy consumption and also the synchronization error compared with other existing protocols.