Clock Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Network With Selective Convergence Rate for Event Driven Measurement Applications

In this paper, a novel wireless sensor network synchronization protocol for event-driven measurement applications is proposed. The objective is twofold: 1) to provide high accuracy in the area where an event is detected and 2) to ensure a long network lifetime. The complexity of the problem arises from the fact that these two properties are usually in conflict. To increase the synchronization accuracy, nodes are required to exchange synchronization packets at higher rate, thus impacting the network lifetime. Vice versa to ensure a long network life time, the number of packets to be exchanged should be minimized thus impacting the synchronization accuracy. A tradeoff can be achieved by observing that the packet rate should be increased only for the portion of the network surrounding the detected events as only these nodes require a higher accuracy to collect data. The proposed algorithm represents a formalization of this idea. Numerical and experimental results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.