An Improved Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol for Industrial Wireless Networks

Flooding time synchronization protocol (FTSP) is an extendable, robust and steady protocol, which has high synchronization precision in wireless sensor networks. This paper improves the traditional FTSP, according to the characteristics of industrial wireless sensor networks. The key idea is that the node should avoid transmitting the time synchronization message with the rootID and seqNum, which are the same as the ones in the previous transmitted time synchronization message. Simulation result indicates that in an 8-hop network containing 81 Mica2 sensor nodes, our improved FTSP solves the problem in a reelection process. It can reduce the totals of sent and received frames by 20% comparing with the traditional FTSP, while saving the battery power of the sensor nodes and making network persist with synchronization as long as possible.