Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics ›› 2023, Vol. 34 ›› Issue (6): 1465-1472.doi: 10.23919/JSEE.2022.000134

• ELECTRONICS TECHNOLOGY • Previous Articles     Next Articles

A consensus time synchronization protocol in wireless sensor network

Kesong CHEN(), Yu ZHANG()   

  1. 1 School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
  • Received:2021-09-26 Accepted:2022-06-09 Online:2023-12-18 Published:2023-12-29
  • Contact: Kesong CHEN E-mail:cks_skc@126.com;201921010808@std.uestc.edu.cn
  • About author:
    CHEN Kesong was born in 1973. He received his B.S. degree in optical electrical engineering from Chongqing University, M.S. degree in automation from Southwest Petroleum Institute and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), in 1994, 2001, and 2006, respectively. From 1994 to 1998, he was an electrical education technology engineer with Southwest Petroleum Institute of China. From 2001 to 2003, he was a research engineer with the Department of Automation at Southwest Petroleum Institute. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Ph.D. candidate in UESTC. Since 2007, he has been with the School of Information and Communication Engineering of UESTC, where he is currently an associate professor of electrical engineering, and work on various topics related to information and communication engineering. E-mail: cks_skc@126.com

    ZHANG Yu was born in 1997. He received his B.S. degree in electronic and information engineering from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, in 2019, where he is currently pursuing his M.S. degree in information and communication engineering. His main research interest is wireless sensor network. E-mail: 201921010808@std.uestc.edu.cn

Abstract:

Time synchronization is one of the base techniques in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This paper proposes a novel time synchronization protocol which is a robust consensus-based algorithm in the existence of transmission delay and packet loss. It compensates for transmission delay and packet loss firstly, and then, estimates clock skew and clock offset in two steps. Simulation and experiment results show that the proposed protocol can keep synchronization error below 2 μs in the grid network of 10 nodes or the random network of 90 nodes. Moreover, the synchronization accuracy in the proposed protocol can keep constant when the WSN works up to a month.

Key words: time synchronization, consensus algorithm, transmission delay, packet loss, wireless sensor network (WSN)