A novel FM radio based time synchronization scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the necessity of inter-node coordination and cooperative processing, time synchronization is an important and critical issue for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Although many existing approaches have been proposed for time synchronization in WSNs, they suffer from high computational complexity, high power consumption or geographic constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel time synchronization scheme for WSNs based on FM radio, specifically, the hourly broadcasting clock signal is utilized to provide a high resolution, low power consumption and low computational complexity time synchronization scheme. We implement this synchronization scheme in hardware and conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.