A testbed validated simple time synchronization protocol for clustered wireless sensor networks for IoT

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are set to play an important role in the Internet of Things (IoT). WSNs are deployed for many IoT applications like Smart-Street Lighting, Smart-Grid, etc. Time Synchronization Protocol (TSP) is an important protocol in WSNs and it is used for many of its operations. Most of the existing TSPs for WSNs are simulation-based works, which do not fully prove their effectiveness for WSNs. Further, the Line-of-Sight (LOS) conditions in which the WSN nodes are deployed can significantly affect the performance of these TSPs. However, most of the existing protocols neither talk about the LOS conditions in which these protocols were tested nor prove their effectiveness for different LOS conditions. To address these aspects, a synchronization protocol for cluster-based WSNs called a Simple Hierarchical Algorithm for Time Synchronization (H-SATS) has been proposed in this work and its performance is tested on a densely deployed large-sized WSN testbed in different LOS conditions. Further, H-SATS has been compared with the traditional regression-based method, which is the core synchronization scheme for different synchronization protocols in clustered WSNs. Experiments show that H-SATS outperforms the regression method in terms of synchronization accuracy to a maximum of 26.7% for a 30-node network.