Towards Master-less WSN Clock Synchronization with a Light Communication Protocol

Time synchronization of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes is essential in those applications requiring distributed task scheduling or data aggregation and fusion. In this paper, a new synchronization procedure based on a distributed Proportional Integral (PI) consensus controller is described.Compared to other similar solutions, the proposed approach keeps into account the effect of random communication and processing delays and it is expected to have lower communicatio noverhead. Also, it is designed to avoid the election of any fixed time reference node, thus potentially improving the robustness of the whole synchronization procedure. Some simulation resultsshow that the procedure works correctly even in different network traffic conditions. © 2010 IEEE.