A Novel Rapid-flooding Approach with Real-time Delay Compensation for Wireless Sensor Network Time Synchronization

Abstract: One-way-broadcast based flooding time synchronization algorithms are commonly used in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, the packet delay and clock drift pose challenges to accuracy, as they entail serious by-hop error accumulation problems in the WSNs. To overcome it, a rapid flooding multi-broadcast time synchronization with real-time delay compensation (RDC-RMTS) is proposed in this paper. By using a rapid-flooding protocol, flooding latency of the referenced time information is significantly reduced in the RDC-RMTS. In addition, a new joint clock skew-offset maximum likelihood estimation is developed to obtain the accurate clock parameter estimations, and the real-time packet delay estimation. Moreover, an innovative implementation of the RDC-RMTS is designed with an adaptive clock offset estimation. The experimental results indicate that, the RDC-RMTS can easily reduce the variable delay and significantly slow the growth of by-hop error accumulation. Thus, the proposed RDC-RMTS can achieve accurate time synchronization in large-scale complex WSNs.