The Sticking Heartbeat Aperture Resynchronization Protocol

As wireless sensor networks become more ubiquitous in the world, the need for lightweight, resilient time synchronization protocols is apparent. Wireless nodes' internal clocks are subject to drift over time due to manufacturing imperfections and environmental changes. While various protocols have been introduced that attempt to correct for this drift, they each have their own peculiarities and issues. This paper presents a new protocol, the Sticking Heartbeat Aperture Resynchronization Protocol (SHARP), that reduces synchronization error and resolves shortcomings of existing protocols. We have implemented and compared SHARP to two existing (and noteworthy) time synchronization protocols, Reference Broadcast Synchronization (RBS) and Simple Synchronization Protocol (SISP), on Atmel ATMega328p based microcontroller platforms with IEEE 802.15.4 Xbee radio modules. We show that SHARP exhibits a higher level of synchronization than SISP (which in turn exhibited much better performance than RBS), while requiring significantly fewer messages.