Time Synchronization Based on Spanning Tree for Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, wireless sensor networks have been an interesting and important research area. The time synchronization is an important problem for wireless sensor networks. In this paper, a novel time synchronization scheme based on spanning tree for wireless sensor networks is proposed. First, we create a spanning tree of all the nodes in the network by broadcasting children-find packets. Then, the spanning tree is divided into multiple subtrees, in which one subtree synchronization algorithm can be performed. After that, time synchronization of the whole network will be achieved. Performance analyses and simulations are presented in this paper, and demonstrate that our proposed scheme has much less synchronization error than RBS.