An accurate on-demand time synchronization protocol for wireless sensor networks

Time synchronization is a critical component in any wireless sensor network (WSN). In terms of energy consumption, on-demand time synchronization is better than continuous synchronization. However, currently existing on-demand time synchronization protocols have a very low accuracy and very strong spatial accumulative effect. These features are not suitable for several types of WSN applications, such as applications with stringent temporal requirements, or applications that have a large spatial region of interest. In this paper, we propose an on-demand time synchronization protocol, named AOTSP (Accurate On-demand Time Synchronization Protocol), which differs from other protocols of the same category by having the following advantages, as shown in our theoretical analysis and simulation results: (1) weak spatial accumulative effect; (2) fairly low communication cost; (3) low computational complexity; (4) high accuracy; (5) high scalability. Such features make AOTSP a suitable time synchronization protocol for a broad range of WSN applications.

► We propose an on-demand time synchronization protocol (AOTSP) for wireless sensor networks.
► AOTSP has nanosecond-order accuracy, which is much better than the same type algorithms.
► AOTSP has the lowest communication cost among the same type algorithms.
► AOTSP is suitable for networks of various sizes.
► AOTSP has very low computational complexity.