A beaconless asymmetric energy-efficient time synchronization scheme for resource-constrained multi-hop wireless sensor networks

Xintao Huan*, Kyeong Soo Kim, Sanghyuk Lee, Eng Gee Lim, Alan Marshall

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

64 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The ever-increasing number of WSN deployments based on a large number of battery-powered, low-cost sensor nodes, which are limited in their computing and power resources, puts the focus of WSN time synchronization research on three major aspects of accuracy, energy consumption, and computational complexity. In the literature, the latter two aspects haven't received much attention compared to the accuracy of WSN time synchronization. Especially in multi-hop WSNs, intermediate gateway nodes are overloaded with tasks for not only relaying messages but also a variety of computations for their offspring nodes as well as themselves. Therefore, not only minimizing the energy consumption but also lowering the computational complexity while maintaining the synchronization accuracy is crucial to the design of time synchronization schemes for resource-constrained sensor nodes. In this paper, focusing on the three aspects of WSN time synchronization, we introduce a framework of reverse asymmetric time synchronization for resource-constrained multi-hop WSNs and propose a beaconless energy-efficient time synchronization scheme based on reverse one-way message dissemination. Experimental results with a WSN testbed based on TelosB motes running TinyOS demonstrate that the proposed scheme conserves up to 95% energy consumption compared to the flooding time synchronization protocol while achieving microsecond-level synchronization accuracy.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8935413
Pages (from-to)1716-1730
Number of pages15
JournalIEEE Transactions on Communications
Volume68
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2020

Keywords

  • Beaconless time synchronization
  • energy efficiency
  • reverse asymmetric time synchronization
  • wireless sensor networks

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