Research On Clustering-based Time Synchronization Algorithm For Wireless Sensor Networks

With the great development of modern communications, electronics and embeddedtechnologies, WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) shows a broad application prospects in militaryobservation, Environmental Monitoring，health care, industrial control and other areas. It links thelogical information world and the real physical world together to achieve ubiquitous surveillanceof physical world. Currently, research on WSN has become a hot field of information.The realization of many capabilities in WSN requires the collaboration of lots of sensornodes, so that, time synchronization has become a key technology of WSN. The research ofsingle-hop time synchronization algorithm has been mature, but the multi-hop timesynchronization algorithms are relatively weak at this stage. Because of the limited calculationand energy of WSN, those time synchronization algorithms could not meet the actual applicationrequirements. Thus, this paper proposed a improved algorithm (CITPSN) which aimed at a largerscale, higher density cluster-based WSN.This paper introduced and analyzed several typical WSN time synchronization protocols.Aiming at the characteristics of cluster-based WSN and the disadvantages of TPSN timesynchronization algorithm, combined with the principle of RBS synchronization algorithm, thispaper proposed an Clustering-based Improved algorithm (CITPSN). This algorithm based oncluster networks, and realized network-wide time synchronization through into inter-clustersynchronization and inner-cluster synchronization. In the inter-cluster synchronization phase, itused pair-wise message exchange synchronization mechanism to complete synchronizationbetween the cluster heads. In the inner-cluster synchronization phase, it used the improvedpair-wise message exchange synchronization mechanism to realize the synchronization of clusterheads and cluster nodes.Finally, this paper proved that CITPSN algorithm is superior to TPSN algorithm insynchronization precision and energy saving through the network simulation tool OMNET++.