Multi Hop Time Synchronization Protocol for Wireless Ad-Hoc Sensor Networks

Abstract

Flexible and robust time synchronization ensures effective collaboration of nodes in wireless sensor networks leading to accurate prediction of real world events in the vicinity of these networks. Amongst the confluence of factors that makes difficult the time synchronization in these networks, network dynamics while maintaining energy efficiency is a critical issue required to be addressed by existing protocols defined for time synchronization. This paper presents a sender-receiver based multihop time synchronization protocol that is energy efficient and ensures node synchronization in the network, in case of root or leader node failure. In hierarchical tree based time synchronization protocols, the root node starts and governs the synchronization process. These protocols construct tree only once at the time of network deployment and the root nodes are identified during this phase. Subsequently, the nodes in the entire network get synchronized by these root nodes. The synchronization of nodes is affected if any root node gets disconnected or turns off in the network. The proposed protocol mitigates this drawback of existing popular tree based hierarchical protocols. Moreover, the overall consumption of energy of the protocol proposed in this paper is also reduced as it involves a lower number of messages required for synchronizing multihop networks as compared to other energy efficient protocols.