Enabling Rapid Time Synchronization With Slow-Flooding in Wireless Sensor Networks

Among the flooding-based time synchronization protocols in wireless sensor networks, rapid-flooding outperforms slow-flooding in terms of synchronization speed. However, sometimes it is not realistic to apply rapid-flooding in dense or low-duty cycle networks due to its operational constraint that timing messages must be forwarded immediately after being received. On the contrary, slow-flooding protocols are free from this operational constraint, but they have a fundamental limitation that their convergence time increases with the size of the network. In this letter, we prove that this limitation can be overcome by sharing the compensated skew and timing information to the next hop nodes so that they can all be synchronized in the same round. The evaluation results demonstrate that we can achieve a comparable convergence speed of rapid-flooding protocols with the slow-flooding-based mechanism and can provide better accuracy for network-wide and per-hop synchronization.

Automated summary

This letter examines flooding-based time synchronization protocols in wireless sensor networks and finds that rapid-flooding outperforms slow-flooding in synchronization speed but is not always feasible. In contrast, slow-flooding protocols have a limitation in convergence time which increases with the network size. By sharing compensated skew and timing information, this limitation of slow-flooding can be overcome, achieving comparable convergence speed and better synchronization accuracy compared to rapid-flooding protocols.