Time synchronization of wireless sensor networks with stochastic switching topology

This paper is concerned with the time synchronization problem for a class of sensor networks where the underlying network topology switches among several topology candidates according to a Markovian switching process. A new kind of distributed synchronization algorithm based on average of the local time is provided and employed. To evaluate the energy consumption under different topology cases, a new evaluation index is proposed in this work. Numerical simulations show some interesting finds of time synchronization in the considered sensor networks. At last, to reduce energy consumption, an event-triggered communication protocol is provided and analyzed.