Time Synchronization for Wireless Sensor Networks

Time synchronization is an important problem for wireless sensor networks. In this paper, a novel time synchronization scheme for wireless sensor networks is proposed. First, we create a spanning tree of all the nodes in the network by broadcasting children-find packets. Then, the spanning tree is divided into multiple subtrees, in which two subtree synchronization algorithms can be performed: Two-way message exchange algorithm or broadcasting algorithm. After that, time synchronization of the whole network will be achieved. Performance analyses and simulations are presented in this paper, and demonstrate that our proposed scheme has much better performance than RBS [4] in terms of both synchronization delay and synchronization error.