Controlled Mobility Time Synchronization for WSNs

Abstract

One of the important aspects in wireless sensor networks is time synchronization. Many applications such as military activity monitoring, environmental monitoring and forest fire monitoring require highly accurate time synchronization. Time synchronization assures that all the sensor nodes in wireless sensor network have the same clock time. It is not only essential for aforementioned applications but it is mandatory for TDMA scheduling and proper duty cycle coordination. Time synchronization is a challenging problem due to energy constraints. Most of the existing synchronization protocols use fixed nodes for synchronization, but in the proposed synchronization, algorithm mobile nodes are used to synchronize the stationary nodes in the sensing field. In this paper, we propose a new time synchronization algorithm, named controlled mobility time synchronization (CMTS) with the objective to achieve the higher accuracy while synchronizing the nodes. The proposed approach is used in this paper to synchronize the nodes externally by using the mobile nodes. Simulation results exhibit that proposed controlled mobility time synchronization increases the synchronization precision and reduces the energy consumption as well as synchronization error by reducing the collisions and retransmissions.