Open AccessOptimal consensus‐based clock synchronisation algorithm in wireless sensor network by selective averaging
Author(s) -
Panigrahi Niranjan,
Khilar Pabitra Mohan
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
iet wireless sensor systems
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.433
H-Index - 27
ISSN - 2043-6394
DOI - 10.1049/iet-wss.2013.0102
Subject(s) - node (physics) , wireless sensor network , pairwise comparison , computer science , convergence (economics) , algorithm , synchronization (alternating current) , clock synchronization , root (linguistics) , time synchronization , time complexity , real time computing , computer network , engineering , channel (broadcasting) , linguistics , philosophy , structural engineering , artificial intelligence , economics , economic growth
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received much attention in recent years because of its broad area of applications. In the same breadth, it also faces many challenges. Time synchronisation is one of those fundamental and important challenges faced by WSN. Several approaches have been proposed in recent years for time synchronisation. Most of the approaches are based on synchronising to a reference (root) node's time by considering a hierarchical backbone for the network. However, this approach seems to be not purely distributed, higher accumulated synchronisation error for farthest node from the root and subjected to the root node failure problem. In this study, a fully distributed time synchronisation algorithm is proposed which synchronises all nodes’ time to a consensus value, that is, an average of all nodes’ initial clock values. The algorithm exploits a selective pairwise averaging approach with a linear message complexity of O ( n ), to achieve faster convergence and better synchronisation accuracy than the existing random pairwise average time synchronisation protocol. Simulation results show that almost 50% improvement is achieved in convergence speed, measured in terms of number of iterations, and nearly 30% improvement in total synchronisation error.