• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.45 no.9
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• pp.13-19
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• 2008

Time synchronization of nodes in sensor network synchronizes sensor nodes to one time clock. This is very essential in sensor networks so that the information collected and reported from the sensor nodes becomes meaningful. If sensor nodes are not synchronized, disaster report with time information can be wrong analyzed and this may lead to big calamity. With the limitation of battery and computing power, time synchronization algorithm imported in sensor nodes has to be as simple as it doesn't need big complexity, nor generates many synchronization messages. To reduce the synchronization error, hop count should be kept small between reference node to initiate synchronization and sensor nodes to be synchronized. Therefore, multiple reference nodes are used instead of single reference node. The use of multiple reference nodes introduce the requirement of synchronization among reference nodes in the network. Several algorithms have been proposed till now, but the synchronization among reference nodes are not well considered. This paper proposes improved time synchronization for sensor networks by synchronizing multiple reference nodes inside the network. Through simulation, we validated the effects of new algorithm.