Abstract

Time synchronization, as in all distributed systems, is an important component of a wireless sensor network (WSN), which aims to provide a common timescale for local clocks of nodes in the network. Since all hardware clocks are imperfect, those at different nodes may drift away from each other in time. For this reason, the observed time or durations of time intervals may differ for each node in the network. However, for many applications or networking protocols, it is required that a common view of time exists and is available to all or some of the nodes in the network at any particular instant. This chapter focuses on the time synchronization problem and review existing synchronization methods and protocols for WSNs.

@inbook{SivrikayaTimesync08,
author = {Fikret Sivrikaya and Bülent Yener},
booktitle = {Wireless Sensor Networks: A Networking Perspective},
chapter = {Time Synchronization},
editor = {J. Zheng and A. Jamalipour},
organization = {...},
publisher = {John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ, USA.}, 
series = {...},
volume = {...},
year = {2009},
ISBN = {9780470167632},
ISSN = {...},
}