A Rapid Time Synchronization Scheme Using Virtual Links and Maximum Consensus for Wireless Sensor Networks

Consensus-based time synchronization, which combines multiagent consensus and distributed network techniques, becomes an essential approach to achieve accurate time synchronization in wireless sensor networks. In actual synchronization process, random communication delays will have a negative impact on information exchange, which leads to a significant degradation in the synchronization performance. Besides, the convergence speed of synchronization errors in existing average consensus synchronization algorithms poses challenges due to the iterative update. To deal with these issues, this article proposes a maximum consensus time synchronization scheme based on the multihop virtual links. Primarily, a multihop virtual links mechanism is proposed, which shares clock information among nodes to shorten the convergence time. Meanwhile, a noniterative clock parameters compensation approach based on maximum consensus is developed to further speed up the synchronization process. In addition, a moving average estimator is designed to minimize the adverse impact of delays. The convergence performance of the proposed scheme is proved theoretically. Simulation results verify the correctness of theoretical analysis and also demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms existing algorithms in terms of synchronization accuracy and convergence speed under delays.