Skew Compensation Algorithm for Time Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks

무선 센서 네트워크 시간 동기화에 대한 왜곡 보정 알고리즘

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have emerged as an attractive and key research area over the last decade. Time synchronization is a vital part of infrastructure for any distributed system. In embedded sensor networks, time synchronization is an essential service for correlating data among nodes and communication scheduling. This is realized by exchanging messages that are time stamped using the local clocks on the nodes. Various time synchronization protocols have been proposed aiming to attain high synchronization accuracy, high efficiency and low communication overhead. However, it requires that the time between resynchronization intervals to be as large as possible to obtain a system which is energy efficient having low communication overhead. This paper presents a simple but effective skew compensation algorithm that measures the skew rate of the sensor nodes with respect to the reference node and calibrates itself to compensate for the difference in the frequencies of the nodes. The proposed method can be incorporated with any existing time synchronization protocol for WSNs.