Synchronization of Wireless Sensor Networks for Biomedical Measurement Systems

Abstract

In recent years, sensors have seen a growing interest and a high development in terms of variety of application fields. Interesting biomedical applications use cooperative sensors to monitor the patients’ health status. Such set of cooperative sensors, sometimes equipping wearable or implantable devices, constitute the so called Biomedical Measurement Systems (BMS). In this context, the cooperation among sensors is possible only if they share a common sense of time and the synchronization accuracy is a key factor for the accuracy and the reliability of the monitoring. In this paper a consensus based algorithm to overcome two typical synchronization challenges are taken into account: the trade-off accuracy versus network lifetime and the degradation of the synchronization accuracy in the case a new sensor is added in the network.