A small world model to improve synchronization algorithms for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, there are some network functions and applications that need to know the local time of a node in order to timestamp a sensed data. In general, it may be unfeasible to have a synchronization hardware in each sensor. In this work, we propose a heterogeneous wireless sensor network model based on small world concepts to improve synchronization algorithms for wireless sensor networks. This improvement has two goals: (i) reduce the synchronization error for large wireless sensor networks, and (ii) increase the resilience of synchronization algorithms in the presence of node failures. Therefore, we modified and evaluated the Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol in the proposed model. Simulation results show that the use of small world based models in wireless sensor networks can significantly reduce the synchronization error and also increase the resilience in the synchronization problem.