A Consistent and Low-Overhead Time Synchronization Method for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is one of the hot topics in the field of information, which can be used in the special environment to realize the signal acquisition, processing and transmission. As a key technology of WSNs, time synchronization has achieved a wide range of attention and many scholars have come up with lots of methods to solve the problems for different applications. Among these problems the consistency of multi hop error in large scale networks is one of the key difficulties that need to be further considered. In this paper, a mobile node and many fixed nodes form a mobile wireless network. Furthermore the mobile node is used as the time source. In our method the synchronization process does not depend on any special network topology because fixed nodes directly synchronized to the mobile node that traverse the whole network periodically. For the nodes synchronize to the mobile node directly, the time synchronization of nodes in the network keeps in good consistency. Experiments and analysis suggest that our method has greatly improved the stability and consistency of the time synchronization in compare with the traditional hop by hop synchronization method.