Accuracy-driven synchronization protocol: implementation and experimental evaluation

Sensor networks applications often involve the collaboration between sensor nodes, thus requiring a time-synchronization service able to provide a common timescale. This paper describes the implementation of the Accuracy-Driven Synchronization Protocol (ADSP) on real sensor nodes. ADSP is a time-synchronization algorithm, specifically developed for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). It offers customizable accuracy levels by adopting a novel method to handle the transmission-to-reception time delays. ADSP is conveniently implemented on sensor nodes, requiring light-computation and low-power consumption. In the presented implementation, we show that ADSP can provide time synchronization accuracy in the micro-second scale. Implementation details of ADSP along with the algorithm validation are described for MICA2 and TelosB platforms on both TinyOS 1.x and TinyOS 2.x for single-hop and multi-hop deployment. ADSP performance is demonstrated and compared to the previous time-synchronization approaches.