Abstract
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been used in many fields due to its wide applicability. In this kind of network, each node is independent of each other and has its own local clock and communicates wirelessly. Time synchronization plays a vital role in WSNs and it can ensure accuracy requirements for coordination and data reliability. However, two key challenges exist in large-scale WSNs that are severe resource constraints overhead and multihop time synchronization errors. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted low-consumption time synchronization algorithm based on cross-technology communication (CTC) for a large-scale WSN. This algorithm uses a UAV to send time synchronization data packets for calibration. Moreover, to ensure coverage and a high success rate for UAV data transmission, we use CTC for time synchronization. Without any relays, a high-power time synchronization packet can be sent by a UAV to achieve the time synchronization of low-power sensors. This algorithm can achieve accurate time synchronization with almost zero energy consumption for the sensor nodes. Finally, we implemented our algorithm with 30 low-power RF-CC2430 ZigBee nodes and a Da Jiang Innovations (DJI) M100 UAV on a 1 km highway and an indoor site. The results show that time synchronization can be achieved accurately with almost zero energy consumption for the sensor nodes, and the time synchronization error is less than 30 s in 99% of cases.
Highlights
Time synchronization is one of the most fundamental and widely employed middle-ware services in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) [1,2,3,4]
The results show that time synchronization can be achieved accurately with almost zero energy consumption for the sensor nodes, and the time synchronization error is less than 30 μs in 99% of cases
This paper proposes a novel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted low-consumption time synchronization algorithm called UAV-TS, which is based on cross-technology communication (CTC) for a large-scale wireless sensor network
Summary
Time synchronization is one of the most fundamental and widely employed middle-ware services in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) [1,2,3,4]. Different nodes use their own local clock modules for timing and these local clock modules are implemented by crystal oscillators [2,3,5,6]. Accurate time synchronization can save communication energy, promote position accuracy, optimize monitoring range, and improve system security [7,8,9,10,11]. Pottie and Kaiser [20] noted that the energy consumption of each sensor node
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