Lightweight Data Synchronization Scheme in Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Abstract

Data synchronization is critical for many sensor network operations including collaborative sensing, sensor scheduling and data fusion. Currently, large number of synchronization schemes have been proposed for the sensor network under the assumption that sensors work with the same network structure, network protocol and radio module. These techniques cannot survive in the heterogeneous sensor networks with the development of internet of things. In this paper, we propose a lightweight data synchronization scheme with low power which consists of two phases: first, we propose a heterogeneous clock synchronization algorithm based on the gateway which can synchronize the multi-hop sensor network with the TCP/IP network immediately without introducing amount of communication overhead; then, we also propose a synchronization control scheme in the gateway and we can balance the synchronization requirements through the adaptive buffer management. We implement the proposed scheme in real heterogeneous sensor network platform, and the experiment results show that our scheme can achieve high synchronization accuracy.