Consensus Clock Synchronization for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are emerging as a valuable tool in many fields of science and industry. Time synchronization is an important issue for WSN´s due to the collaborative and distributed nature of the tasks they perform. This paper describes a new technique for clock synchronization in WSNs called consensus clock synchronization that provides internal synchronization to a virtual consensus clock. It is sensitive to the limited resources available to sensor nodes and is robust to many of the challenges faced in dynamic ad-hoc networks. Simulations are presented to analyse the effectiveness of the synchronization protocol in a mesh network.