Node Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, the advances in the development and manufacture techniques have allowed the appearance of small-sized, low-cost and low-power consumption sensors, which are grouped forming wireless sensor networks (WSNs). These networks have application in fields such as military, health or scientific. One critical point in these applications is the time synchronization among the sensors, which helps establishing a time reference for the detection of events. Thus, the network may distinguish the detection of the same event by different sensors or even track the presence of this event as it moves over the geographical region to be covered. However, the use of synchronization protocols will also allow processing different signals distributedly, improving the sensibility and the accuracy of the measurements. This paper describes some experiments performed to evaluate the applicability of this distributed signal processing scheme.