Experimental characterization of synchronization protocols for wireless networks

Nowadays more and more measurement applications where sensor nodes cooperate to realize a data fusion process are entrusted to wireless sensor networks (WSN). Data fusion to be accurate requires that nodes be referred to a common clock and among themselves. In this scenario node synchronization got a crucial research topic and even sophisticated synchronization algorithms can be easily found in literature. Not a few others show to be especially designed for low cost, low memory and low power architectures. Their performance is usually evaluated either through analytical considerations or in simulation environments, but in some cases where ad hoc radio systems have been adopted. This paper makes a first step toward an experimental characterization of synchronization protocols that hold into account also influence factors which arise when commercial wireless communication busses as WiFi, BlueTooth (BT), ZigBee are adopted.