Advantages in synchronization for wireless sensor networks

Providing efficient mechanisms to reduce consuming power and optimize computing resources is one of the most important goals to be pursued when an efficient utilization of sensor networks has to be addressed. To reduce power consumption at the MAC level, sensor networks usually make use of a scheduled contention protocol that adopts listen/sleep cycles. Cycles synchronization can improve performance, although in a sensor network with hundreds of nodes a predefined synchronization degree will determine a huge power consumption due to messages overhead. This paper aims to analyze advantages and disadvantages of cycles synchronization. It provides some rules that help to select and configure a MAC level protocol or a synchronization algorithm with the aim to maximize the network performance.