A new energy-efficient time synchronization algorithm

In recent years, issues of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been widely studied. The energy is limited in WSNs. However, it always takes much energy to achieve highly accurate time synchronization. In this paper, a Spanning Tree-based Energy-efficient Time Synchronization (STETS) strategy for WSNs is proposed. In STETS, only a small number of sensor nodes in the WSN have the privilege to send messages and each of these nodes sends only one broadcast in a single round of time synchronization. By taking advantage of the intersection and difference set of these broadcasts´ domains, a spanning tree structure will be created in the WSN. By using the information carried by these broadcasts, time synchronization process will also be completed. We simulate and evaluate the performances of the algorithm on NS2. The experiment results show that our algorithm is efficient in both energy consumption and accuracy of time synchronization.