An Alternative Approach for Energy Efficient Time Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Time synchronization is an important aspect in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). They make wide use of synchronized time in many contexts like data fusion etc. Without synchronizing, the sensed data will lose valuable context. Existing time synchronization methods cannot be used with such wireless networks as at the time of their designing such networks were not foreseen. So either present synchronization techniques need to be extended to WSN or are to be approached in different way. While designing synchronizing algorithm, requirements of energy, cost, scope, scalability, lifetime of WSN should be kept in mind. In this paper different approach for time synchronization in sensor networks is presented. This paper proposes an improved algorithm used for WSN in fixed deployment scenario of nodes. The Proposed algorithm is compared with ReferenceBroadcast Synchronization (RBS) synchronization technique. Simulation results and Performance analysis shows that compared with RBS synchronization algorithms, the proposed time synchronization algorithm takes shorter time for synchronizing whole network and is more energy efficient.