Event-triggered communication for distributed time synchronization in WSNs

In order to reduce the energy consumption of time synchronization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), this paper proposes a distributed event-triggered communication algorithm for time synchronization. The clock feature of each node is modeled as the discrete-time second-order state equation, each node in the network determines whether and when to broadcast its local time to its neighbors based on an event-triggered mechanism. For each node in the network, the trigger condition is designed based on the errors between the present states and states last transmitted, together with the disagreements on states last transmitted among neighboring nodes. Finally, simulation results are given to show the effectiveness of the presented algorithm.