Accurate, Energy-Efficient, Decentralized, Single-Hop, Asynchronous Time Synchronization Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: This paper concerns with the synchronization of infrastructure impoverished sensor networks under harsh conditions. It suggests three novel asynchronous, decentralized, energyefficient time synchronization protocols. The protocols require only single hop, sparse communication with unlabeled neighboring nodes of the network to determine accurately the time of the gateway node. The time of a node is considered as a dynamical variable of a discrete system whose evolution is asynchronously activated/inhibited by another dynamical switching system. The protocols are termed: Timed Sequential Asynchronous Update (TSAU), Unidirectional Asynchronous Flooding (UAF) and the Bidirectional Asynchronous Flooding (UAF). Along with intensive simulation, the protocols are implemented and tested on the MicaZ sensor node platform. A comprehensive evaluation of the energy consumption, memory requirements, convergence time, local and global synchronization errors of the proposed protocols are carried-out against Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol (FTSP) and Flooding Proportional Integral Time Synchronization Protocol (FloodPISync). All the analysis show that these protocols outperform the well known protocols. Also, being asynchronous, they are more realistic relative to the synchronous ones.