RTSP: An accurate and energy-efficient protocol for clock synchronization in WSNs

Wireless sensor networks need accurate time synchronization for data consistency and coordination. Although the existing algorithms for time synchronization offer very good accuracy, their energy consumption is high, and distant nodes are poorly synchronized. We propose a Recursive Time Synchronization Protocol (RTSP) which accurately synchronizes all the nodes in a network to a global clock using multi-hop architecture in an energy-efficient way. It achieves better performance due to the MAC-layer time-stamping based on Start of Frame Delimiter byte, infrequent broadcasts by a dynamically elected reference node, compensation of the propagation delay and adjustment of the timestamps at each hop, estimation of the relative skew and offset using least square linear regression on two data points (2LR), adaptive re-synchronization interval, aggregation of the synchronization requests, and energy awareness. A detailed analysis of the sources of errors is also provided. Simulation results show that the RTSP can achieve an average accuracy of 0.3 microseconds in a large multi-hop flat network while using five-times lesser energy than that of FTSP in the long run and performs even better in a clustered network where it can achieve an average accuracy of 0.23 microseconds while using seven-times lesser energy.