Towards an adaptive synchronization policy for wireless sensor networks

Time synchronization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is essential to coordinate activities distributed among different nodes. In recent years many protocols have been proposed to achieve high-accuracy synchronization. However, up to now only few researchers focused their attention on the issue of trading the number of periodic synchronization events for target accuracy. In fact, the synchronization requirements of low-cost WSNs often are not particularly strict and strongly depend on the intended application. In this paper, we propose an algorithm aimed at changing the number of synchronization events as a function of the probability of finding the various WSN nodes within given tolerance boundaries. Some experimental results to validate the proposed algorithm are reported. This algorithm is expected to pave the way to novel WSN synchronization protocols, which should provide better flexibility and power efficiency than existing ones.