A Practical Distributed Lightweight Multi-Hop Time Synchronization Algorithm for Linear Wireless Sensor Networks Implemented on a PIC Based System with Realistic Experimental Analysis

Year 2020, Volume: 24 Issue: 6, 1198 - 1209, 01.12.2020

Ahmet Erpay Md Abdullah Al Imran , Ali Kara

https://doi.org/10.16984/saufenbilder.710984

Abstract

Time synchronization is fundamental in the distributed networked systems, especially in Wireless Sensor Networks where a global time is essential to make sense of the events like collection of data and scheduled sleep/wake-up of nodes. There exists numerous time synchronization algorithms and techniques in the literature. Nonetheless, these proposed methods lack realistic experimentation of the synchronization process which is vital from the realization point of view. This study aims to bridge that gap by presenting a distributed lightweight time synchronization protocol implemented on an inexpensive PIC platform. Furthermore, PIC-based systems hadn’t been investigated before and gives an idea of the simplicity of the algorithm. Experimental analysis was done to see the performance of the protocol. The core motivation of the experiments was to the study the impact of the environment (e.g. indoor, outdoors, temperature variations and interference) on the synchronization. Our findings show that temperature indeed impedes the synchronization accuracy.

Keywords

Clock drift and offset, Linear Wireless sensor network, Spanning tree network, Time synchronization

References

• F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam and E. Cayirci. Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey. Computer Networks, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 393-422, 2002.
• F. Sivrikaya and B. Yener, “Time Synchronization in Sensor Networks: A Survey,” Network, IEEE vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 45–50, 2004.
• J. Elson, L. Girod, and D. Estrin, “Fine-grained network time synchronization using reference broadcasts,” in 5th USENIX Symp. Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI’02), Dec. 2002.
• D. Cox, E. Jovanov, A. Milenkovic, "Time Synchronization for ZigBee Networks," in Proc. of the 37th IEEE Southeastern Symposium on System Theory (SSST'05), Tuskegee, AL, pp. 135-138, March 2005.
• A. Kara, M. A. Al Imran, K. Karadag, "Linear Wireless Sensor Networks for Cathodic Protection Monitoring of Pipelines," in 2019 International Conference on Mechatronics, Robotics and System Engineering (MoRSE 2019), Bali, Indonesia, 2019.
• S. Ping, Delay measurement time synchronization for wireless sensor networks, Intel Research, IRB-TR-03-013, 2003.
• L. M. He, "Time Synchronization for Wireless Sensor Networks," 2009 10th ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligences, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing, Daegu, pp. 438-443, 2009.
• Jana van Greunen, Jan Rabaey, Lightweight time synchronization for sensor networks, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM international conference on Wireless sensor networks and applications, September 19-19, 2003, San Diego, CA, USA.
• J. Wu, L. Zhang, Y. Bai, Y. Sun, Cluster-based consensus time synchronization for wireless sensor networks, IEEE Sens. J., vol. 15, pp. 1404-1413, 2015.
• W. Su and I. F. Akyildiz, "Time-diffusion synchronization protocol for wireless sensor networks," in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 384-397, 2005.
• Yoon, S., Veerarittiphan, C., and Sichitiu, M. L. 2007. Tiny-Sync: Tight time synchronization for wireless sensor networks. ACM Trans. Sens. Netw. 3, 2, Article 8 (June 2007), 34 pages.
• E. Garone, A. Gasparri and F. Lamonaca, “Clock synchronization protocol for wireless sensor networks with bounded communication delays”, Automatica, vol. 59, pp. 60-72, 2015.
• M. L. Sichitiu and C. Veerarittiphan, "Simple, accurate time synchronization for wireless sensor networks," 2003 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking, 2003. WCNC 2003., New Orleans, LA, USA, vol. 2., pp. 1266-1273, 2003.
• J. Chen, Q. Yu, Y. Zhang, H. H. Chen and Y. Sun, "Feedback-Based Clock Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Control Theoretic Approach," in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. 59, no. 6, pp. 2963-2973, 2010.
• I. F. Akyıldız and M. Vuran, Wireless Sensor Networks. Wiley, 2009.
• F. Bonavolontà, A. Tedesco, R. S. L. Moriello and A. Tufano, "Enabling wireless technologies for industry 4.0: State of the art," 2017 IEEE International Workshop on Measurement and Networking (M&N), Naples, pp. 1-5, 2017.
• G. Bam, E. Dilcan, B. Dogan, B. Dinc and B. Tavli, "DLWTS: Distributed Light Weight Time Synchronization for Wireless Sensor Networks," 2015 International Symposium on Intelligent Signal Processing and Communication Systems (ISPACS), Nusa Dua, pp. 447-450, 2015.
• J. He, P. Cheng, L. Shi, J. Chen and Y. Sun, "Time Synchronization in WSNs: A Maximum-Value-Based Consensus Approach," in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 59, no. 3, pp. 660-675, 2014.
• Amulya Ratna Swain, R.C. Hansdah, A model for the classification and survey of clock synchronization protocols in WSNs, Ad Hoc Networks, vol. 27, pp. 219-241, 2015.
• Djamel Djenouri, Nassima Merabtine, Fatma Zohra Mekahlia, Messaoud Doudou,Fast distributed multi-hop relative time synchronization protocol and estimators for wireless sensor networks, Ad Hoc Networks, vol. 11, no. 8, pp. 2329-2344, 2013.
• F. L. Walls and J. J. Gagnepain, "Environmental sensitivities of quartz oscillators," in IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 241-249, March 1992. M. A. Al Imran, Y. Dalveren, B. Tavli, and A. Kara. “Optimal operation mode selection for energy-efficient light-weight multi-hop time synchronization in linear wireless sensor networks,” in 2020 EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, 1, pp. 1-9, 2020.