A Practical Distributed Lightweight Multi-Hop Time Synchronization Algorithm for Linear Wireless Sensor Networks Implemented on a PIC Based System with Realistic Experimental Analysis

Abstract

Time synchronization is fundamental in the distributed networked systems, especially in Wireless Sensor Networks where a global time is essential to make sense of the events like collection of data and scheduled sleep/wake-up of nodes. There exists numerous time synchronization algorithms and techniques in the literature. Nonetheless, these proposed methods lack realistic experimentation of the synchronization process which is vital from the realization point of view. This study aims to bridge that gap by presenting a distributed lightweight time synchronization protocol implemented on an inexpensive PIC platform. Furthermore, PIC-based systems hadn’t been investigated before and gives an idea of the simplicity of the algorithm. Experimental analysis was done to see the performance of the protocol. The core motivation of the experiments was to the study the impact of the environment (e.g. indoor, outdoors, temperature variations and interference) on the synchronization. Our findings show that temperature indeed impedes the synchronization accuracy.Keywords: Clock drift and offset, Linear Wireless sensor network, Spanning tree network, Time synchronization.