Title: Design and analysis of a peer-to-peer based distributed clock synchronisation protocol for wireless sensor networks

Authors: Amulya Ratna Swain; R. C. Hansdah

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India ' Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India

Abstract: Clock synchronisation is an important requirement for various applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Most of the existing clock synchronisation protocols for WSNs use some hierarchical structure that introduces an extra overhead due to the dynamic nature of WSNs. Besides, it is difficult to integrate these clock synchronisation protocols with sleep scheduling scheme, which is a major technique to conserve energy. In this paper, we propose a fully distributed peer-to-peer based clock synchronisation protocol, named Distributed Clock Synchronisation Protocol (DCSP), using a novel technique of pullback for complete sensor networks. The pullback technique ensures that synchronisation phases of any pair of clocks always overlap. We have derived an exact expression for a bound on maximum synchronisation error in the DCSP protocol, and simulation study verifies that it is indeed less than the computed upper bound. Experimental study using a few TelosB motes also verifies that the pullback occurs as predicted.

Keywords: P2P clock synchronisation; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; peer-to-peer; distributed clock synchronisation; bounded error; pullback; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2012.051525

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2012 Vol.12 No.4, pp.195 - 209

Received: 19 Jun 2011
Accepted: 16 Sep 2012
Published online: 20 Jan 2013 *

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