Survey of Time Synchronization Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensors are tiny battery operated devices which detect and respond to the changes in the environment. Wireless sensor networks are a collection of wirelessly connected sensors and are used in real world. The aggregated result of a network is produced by analyzing the local results of all the nodes. The nodes communicate through sending messages among each other. Hence time synchronization is an important aspect of wireless networks. In this paper, we study the different existing time synchronization protocols and compare them on different criteria to prove the need for a new protocol which is scalable, secure, energy efficient, fast convergent and less complex. Keywords— Wireless sensor networks, time synchronization, clock offset, message delay,