On the practical implementation of propagation delay and clock skew compensated high-precision time synchronization schemes with resource-constrained sensor nodes in multi-hop wireless sensor networks



Huan, Xintao ORCID: 0000-0002-6114-4994 and Kim, Kyeong Soo
(2020) On the practical implementation of propagation delay and clock skew compensated high-precision time synchronization schemes with resource-constrained sensor nodes in multi-hop wireless sensor networks. COMPUTER NETWORKS, 166. p. 106959.

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Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), implementing a high-precision time synchronization scheme on resource-constrained sensor nodes is a major challenge. Our investigation of the practical implementation on a real testbed of the state-of-the-art WSN time synchronization scheme based on the asynchronous source clock frequency recovery and the reverse two-way message exchange, which can compensate for both propagation delay and clock skew for higher precision, reveals that its performance on battery-powered, low-complexity sensor nodes is not up to that predicted from simulation experiments due to the limited precision floating-point arithmetic of sensor nodes. Noting the lower computational capability of typical sensor nodes and its impact on time synchronization, we propose an asymmetric high-precision time synchronization scheme that can provide high-precision time synchronization even with resource-constrained sensor nodes in multi-hop WSNs. In the proposed scheme, all synchronization-related computations are done at the head node equipped with abundant computing and power resources, while the sensor nodes are responsible for timestamping only. Experimental results with a testbed based on TelosB motes running TinyOS demonstrate that the proposed time synchronization scheme can avoid time synchronization errors resulting from the single-precision floating-point arithmetic of the resource-constrained sensor nodes and achieve microsecond-level time synchronization accuracy in multi-hop WSNs.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: 20 pages, 10 figures
Uncontrolled Keywords: Asymmetric time synchronization, Reverse two-way message exchange, Multi-hop wireless sensor networks
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 02 Jan 2020 17:06
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023 00:12
DOI: 10.1016/j.comnet.2019.106959
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3067998

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