Clapping and Broadcasting Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks

The Clapping and Broadcasting Synchronization (CBS) algorithm, which is specifically designed for large-scale sensor networks with low communication overhead and high synchronization accuracy, is introduced. The CBS protocol uses broadcasting rather than pairwise communication to accomplish synchronization. In the CBS scheme, the initial offset of local clocks can be successfully eliminated by the operation of clapping nodes, which leads to significant improvement in synchronization accuracy. The CBS protocol was implemented on the TelosB platform and its performance was evaluated in a variety of experiments. The results demonstrate that the CBS protocol outperforms the current state-of-the-art approach, the Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol (FTSP), in both single-hop and multi-hop scenarios in terms of synchronous precision and energy consumption. In multi-hop scenarios, the CBS algorithm keeps about 50% of its synchronization errors within 1 ms. In comparison, the FTSP keeps less than 7% of its synchronization errors within this range. In both single-hop and multi-hop scenarios, the CBS protocol is over 3.2 times more energy-efficient than the FTSP.