Real-Time Performance Evaluation for Flooding and Recursive Time Synchronization Protocols over Arduino and XBee

Abstract

Time synchronization is a crucial part of distributed systems. It is often required for data reliability and coordination in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Wireless sensor networks have three major goals: time synchronization, low bandwidth operation, and energy efficiency. Different time synchronization algorithms are aimed at achieving these objectives using various methods. This paper presents performance evaluation of two state-of-the-art time synchronization protocols, namely, Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol and Recursive Time Synchronization Protocol. To achieve time synchronization in wireless sensor networks, these two protocols make use of broadcast and peer-to-peer mechanisms. Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol uses the former mechanism, while Recursive Time Synchronization Protocol uses the latter mechanism. To perform the performance evaluation, three performance metrics are used including synchronization message count per cycle, bandwidth, and convergence time. Arduino is used as a micro-controller and XBee as transceiver to verify these metrics by utilizing different topologies.