J4 ›› 2015, Vol. 42 ›› Issue (2): 133-139.doi: 10.3969/j.issn.1001-2400.2015.02.022

• Original Articles • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Expansive time synchronization protocol for wireless sensor networks

WANG Jing;ZHANG Shuai;GAO Dan;WANG Yingguan   

  1. (Lab. of Internet of Things System Technology, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201899, China)
  • Received:2013-12-02 Revised:2014-04-24 Online:2015-04-20 Published:2015-04-14
  • Contact: WANG Jing E-mail:wangjingchn@163.com

Abstract: This paper describes the Expansive Time Synchronization Protocol (ETSP) to solve the time synchronization problem of wireless sensor networks. The protocol adopts the idea of synchronizing as many nodes as possible. It utilizes the pair-wise message exchange model to synchronize all nodes located within the broadcast domain of the pair of nodes. A multi-hop synchronization scheme, which adopts the distributed greedy algorithm, is proposed to automatically select the most reasonable synchronization nodes. The single-hop synchronization experiment shows that the algorithm can expand the single-hop synchronization range while keeping single-hop synchronization accuracy. The multi-hop synchronization experiment shows that the algorithm has higher multi-hop synchronization precision. MATLAB simulation results prove that the ETSP can reduce the number of synchronization nodes, thus saving energy required to synchronize the whole network.

Key words: wireless sensor networks, synchronization, synchronization range, multi-hop