Overview of time synchronization protocols in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The emergence of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications such as localizing, tracking, surveillance, speedometers, and so on, synchronizing sensor motes' clocks is essential in WSNs. Thus, many time synchronization protocols are proposed in recent decade to get network wide synchronization. Each of those protocols strives to get a good precision in different ways. This paper aims to review some of the main protocols and classify them based on their scope, topology structure, and dynamicity then analyzes them based on three criteria of accuracy, robustness, and computation load. At the end a comparison is done for the reviewed protocols.