An opportunistic time synchronization algorithm for mobile sensor networks

In mobile sensor networks, the network topology often changes dynamically, which brings more challenges and difficulties to nodes´ time synchronization. This paper proposes a new time synchronization algorithm OTS (Opportunistic Time Synchronization), which makes use of the non-deterministic communication opportunity to synchronize sensor nodes. OTS can effectively deal with the time synchronization problem in mobile sensor networks without any topology construction and additional hardware infrastructure. Simulation results show that OTS can reduce the redundant synchronization messages greatly and possesses good merits in energy consumption, synchronization precision and convergence under proper parameters setting.