Date of Award

2008

Degree Type

Thesis

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Sridhar, Nigamanth

Subject Headings

Synchronization, Time measurements, Wireless sensor networks, Wireless sensor networks, Time synchronization, BTSP wrapper, Energy saving, TinyOS, Booster for time synchronization

Abstract

Time synchronization is an important service for wireless sensor network applications. Nodes in the network stay synchronized by exchanging periodic messages that carry local timestamps. Several algorithms have been proposed in the literature that are suited to different kinds of application scenarios. A common problem across these time synchronization algorithms is that the energy cost of message exchange is high. In fact, the cost of radio communication far outstrips the cost of performing local operations on the processor. If the message exchanges were stopped, nodes will fall out of sync, and may no longer be able to meet application requirements. This thesis presents a wrapper-based approach to sustained time synchronization for wireless sensor networks. As such, this solution Booster for Time Synchronization Protocol (BTSP) will act as a wrapper around a given time synchronization protocol, and will apply local corrector operations to extend the time duration between two message exchanges between nodes. The wrapper performs at least as good as the original protocol provided, reduces the number of message exchanges on average, and consequently the energy consumed, significantly. BTSP has been implemented for TinyOS and evaluated on XSM motes in conjunction with TPSN, a popular time synchronization protocol for sensor networks

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