Agent-Based Timing-Sync Algorithm for Sensor Networks

This paper presents an Agent-based Timing-Sync Algorithm (ATSA) for sensor networks that aims at providing network-wide time synchronization in a sensor network. ATSA works in three steps as following. Firstly, the root time node is selected, and then a hierarchical structure is established in the network, finally, by using time-agent, a pair wise synchronization is performed along the edges of this structure to establish a global timescale throughout the network. Eventually all nodes in the network synchronize their clocks to the reference nodes. We also show the performance of ATSA over small multihop networks and carry out simulations to verify its accuracy over large-scale networks. The results show that the synchronization accuracy of our approach is higher than that of traditional solutions.