A Study on Time Synchronization Protocol to Cover Efficient Power Management in Ubiquitous Sensor Network

Abstract

The sensor networks can be used attractively for various application areas. Time synchronization is important for any Ubiquitous Sensor Networks (USN) systems. USN makes extensive use of synchronized time in many contexts for data fusion. However existing time synchronization protocols are available only for homogeneous sensor nodes of USN. It needs to be extended or redesigned in order to apply to the USN with heterogeneous sensor nodes. Because heterogeneous sensor nodes have different clock sources with the SinkNode of USN, it is impossible to be synchronized global time. In addition, energy efficiency is one of the most significant factors to influence the design of sensor networks, as sensor nodes are limited in power, computational capacity, and memory. In this paper, we propose specific time synchronization based on master-slave topology for the global time synchronization of USN with heterogeneous sensor nodes. The time synchronization master nodes are always able to be synchronized with the SinkNode. Then time synchronization master nodes enable time synchronization slave nodes to be synchronized sleep periods. The proposed master-slave time synchronization for heterogeneous sensor nodes of USN is also helpful for power saving by maintaining maximum sleep time.