Reference Interpolation Protocol for Reducing the Synchronization Messages in Wireless Sensor Network

In wireless sensor network, to provide the proper responses quickly for diverse events, wireless sensor nodes have to cooperate with each other. For successful cooperation, the time synchronization among sensor nodes is an important requirement for application execution. In the wireless sensor network, the message packets including time information are used for the time synchronization. However, the transmission of many message packets will exhaust the battery of wireless sensor nodes. Since wireless sensor nodes works on the limited battery capacity, the excessive transmission of message packets has an negative impact upon their lifetime. In this paper, the Reference Interpolation Protocol (RIP) is proposed to reduce the number of message packets for the time synchronization. The proposed method performs the time interpolation between the reference packet's time and the global time of the base station. The proposed method completes the synchronization operation with only 2 message packets when compared to the previous Reference Broadcast Synchronization (RBS) technique. Due to the simple synchronization procedure, our method greatly reduces the number of synchronization messages and showed the 12.7 times less power consumption than the RBS method. From the decrease in the transmission of message packets, the convergence time among wireless sensor nodes is shortened and the lifetime of wireless sensor nodes is also prolonged as much as the amount of saved battery energy.