An Accurate Time Synchronization Algorithm Based on Ultra-Wideband Wireless Sensor Networks

Aiming at the problems of transmission delay and multi-hop error accumulation in time synchronization of ultra-wideband wireless sensor networks, a precise flooding time synchronization protocol (PFTS) based on ultra-wideband wireless sensor networks is proposed. In terms of transmission delay, a more accurate packet transmission delay is obtained by means of multiple two-way information interactions; in the time synchronization phase, a novel flooding time synchronization broadcast model is designed, which calculates the timestamp information obtained from two sets of multiple one-way broadcasts within a period by maximum likelihood estimation to obtain the accurate time deviation and relative clock rate between nodes. In the time synchronization of multi-hop nodes, the relationship between hardware clock and logic clock is introduced to reduce the multi-hop error accumulation. Simulation results show that the algorithm possesses higher time synchronization accuracy in terms of local synchronization error as well as global synchronization error performance compared to other flooding time synchronization algorithms.