Abstract
Time synchronization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a fundamental issue for the coordination of distributed entities and events. Nondeterministic latency, which may decrease the accuracy and precision of time synchronization can occur at any point in the network layers. Specially, random back-off by channel contention leads to a large uncertainty. In order to reduce the large nondeterministic uncertainty from channel contention, we propose an enhanced precision time synchronization protocol in this paper. The proposed method reduces the traffic needed for the synchronization procedure by selectively forwarding the packet. Furthermore, the time difference between sensor nodes increases as time advances because of the use of a clock source with a cheap crystal oscillator. In addition, we provide a means to maintain accurate time by adopting hardware-assisted time stamp and drift correction. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, for which sensor nodes are designed and implemented. According to the evaluation results, the performance of the proposed method is better than that of a traditional time synchronization protocol.
Highlights
Time values provide the criterion to order events, their causal relationships and correlations, and the rate of change of the entities involved [1,2,3]
We have proposed an enhanced precision time synchronization for wireless sensor networks
Uncertainty, which has a harmful influence on the accuracy of time synchronization, can occur at all layers in a network protocol stack
Summary
Time values provide the criterion to order events, their causal relationships and correlations, and the rate of change of the entities involved [1,2,3]. Traditional time synchronization protocols have struggled to provide precision time synchronization. Their efforts have largely focused on removing jitter at the protocol stack, correcting clock drift and considering a poor resource node. The random back-off delay for channel access can be a crucial uncertainty that is a nondeterministic error factor for the time synchronization procedure [12,13] This error factor caused by the random back-off delay has to be considered for precise time synchronization. An evaluation of the implemented nodes showed that the proposed method had 5-times better performance than a traditional time synchronization protocol in terms of precision.
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