Quantitative and Qualitative Comparison Study of Reference Based Time Synchronization Approach in Wireless Sensor Network

Time synchronization is an important research issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many applications based on these WSNs assume local clocks at each sensor node that need to be synchronized to a common notion of time. Some inherent properties of sensor networks such as limited energy, storage, computation, and bandwidth resources, combined with potentially high density of nodes make conventional synchronization methods unsuitable for these networks. Therefore, an increasing research focus on designing synchronization algorithms is required. In this paper we explore various time synchronization protocols and present theoretical analysis of protocols based on quantitative and qualitative criteria with the proposed Tree Structured Time Synchronization Protocol. The comparative study shows that it is an excellent conciliation among synchronization accuracy, computational complexity, and convergence time.