Event-triggered communication for time synchronization in WSNs

Abstract

In order to reduce the energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), this paper proposes a distributed event-triggered communication for time synchronization. The clock feature of each node is modeled as the discrete-time second-order dynamics. Each node in the network determines whether and when to broadcast its states to its neighbors based on an event trigger mechanism. For each node in the network, the trigger function is designed based on the disagreement between its current states and those estimated from last transmitted, which thus is independent of the states of its in-neighbors. Then the condition about the updating period and the control gain is presented to guarantee the time synchronization of the network. It is shown that the proposed event-triggered communication can play a good tradeoff between the convergence rate and the communication rate of the time synchronization algorithm, and it also outperforms the corresponding time-triggered communication in the case that the same communication rate is used. Finally, simulation results are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.