A light-weight fault-tolerant time synchronization for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have received a lot of attention recently due to their enormous potential in different applications. Many applications in WSN require time synchronization among all the sensor nodes. However, in practice, network do normally have some abnormal nodes (we called Fault Clock Node or FCN), which could cause high synchronization error. In this paper, we present a light-weight fault-tolerant time synchronization protocol (LiFTiS) which works in a way similar to NTP. The protocol is aware of FCN and is able to detect its children in hierarchical tree. We also propose a light-weight algorithm for selecting the best parent. Our simulation results show that the average synchronization error using the proposed protocol is 5-31% less than the existing algorithms e.g. TPSN etc.