State-Based Synchronization Protocol in Sensor Networks

Some applications of the sensor network require precise time synchronization among local clocks of the sensors. Due to the limited resource in the sensor network, it is not trivial to maintain the said synchronization. In this paper, we propose a novel method, referred to as the state-based synchronization protocol (SBSP) to solve this issue. We create a finite state machine in the SBSP to describe the synchronization actions at each sensor node. Specifically, the SBSP makes use of the ADV, REQ and SYNC packets and the finite state machine to achieve synchronization. We will compare the performance of the proposed protocol against the popular timing-sync protocol for sensor networks (TPSN) and lightweight tree-based synchronization (LTS) through simulations. The SBSP reduces the redundant message exchanges in the TPSN. It is shown that the SBSP saves power with less message exchanges while maintaining better synchronization error.