A Routing Based Time Synchronization Protocol for Multi-hop Wireless Networks

Time synchronization is critical in distributed wireless networks to achieve and maintain coordination among distributed network nodes. In this paper, we propose a routing based time synchronization protocol (RBTSP) for multi-hop wireless networks. Different from many existing time synchronization protocols, our objective aims at minimizing the number of timing packet exchange and reducing the non-deterministic delay. We conduct mathematical analysis and simulation experiments to demonstrate the working of the proposed time synchronization method. The results manifest that our scheme can achieve better performance on synchronization accuracy and power efficiency.