An Enhanced Secure Pairwise Broadcast Time Synchronization Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes an Enhanced Secure Pairwise Broadcast Time Synchronization (E-SPBS) protocol that allows authenticated MAC-layer timestamping on high-data rate radio interfaces. E-SPBS ensures the security of the Receiver-Only synchronization approach using a Public-Key-based Cryptography authentication scheme. The robustness and accuracy of E-SPBS were evaluated through simulations and experiments on a MICAz platform. Both simulation and experimental results demonstrate that E-SPBS achieves high robustness to external and internal attacks with low energy consumption. However, while the simulation results indicate that E-SPBS can achieve an average accuracy of less than 1μ s, the experimental results show that the synchronization error is higher and not stable. This comparison gives us a good indication on how much confidence can be put into simulation results.