Lightweight and energy efficient time synchronization for sensor network

In wireless sensor networks, efficient usage of energy helps in improving the network lifetime. Many power saving MAC schemes based on TDMA have been proposed in recent years, but none of them particularly discuss the problem of time synchronization. As there are many time synchronization algorithms have been proposed, but they can't be applied to these TDMA MAC schemes directly. In this paper, a lightweight and energy efficient time synchronization (LEETS) scheme that can be applied to all kinds of TDMA power saving MAC schemes was proposed. In the scheme, nodes compete the first slot of each time frame to broadcast local time information, which can be used to realize whole network synchronization. And guard interval is inserted in two consecutive slots to avoid collision may be caused by synchronization errors. The scheme has been simulated and the results show LEETS needs less message exchanges to realize synchronization than other time synchronization schemes. So, It is lightweight and energy efficient.