| Wireless sensor network is an all-new technology solution for information collection and data processing which generally consists of large amount of small, wireless and low-cost sensor nodes. They are normally deployed in an area of surveillance without people's observation, forming an ad hoc, multi-hop network system. And then they collect and process the information of interest about the objects in that area on a collaborative basis. Wireless sensor network has a broad prospect in many kinds of application, bringing about a great attention and an active research in academic and industry field.Time synchronization is a very important supportive technology for wireless sensor network. Many applications and other key technologies of wireless sensor network are all based on the presumption that all nodes in the network have the same time. The general procedure of time synchronizing of nodes is accomplished by exchanging message packets carrying with time information. However, the transmission of message packets dissipates most of the battery energy of sensor node. Since wireless sensor nodes works on the low battery capacity, the overuse of message packets will impact their lifetime negatively.In this paper, our focus of attention is on reducing energy consumption during time synchronization. Based on the study of previous traditional RBS method, we then make a research on a new energy effective time synchronization protocol (RIP) which aims at reducing the number of message packets within the process of time synchronization. The proposed method completes the synchronization process with only two message packets within single hop range. We then simulate the RBS and the RIP method using the OPNET network simulation software. The simulation result shows that RIP can greatly cut down on the amount of message packets transmission and convergence time, resulting in an effective reduction on the battery energy consumption and prolonging the lifetime of the sensor nodes. |
PDF Full Text Request