Abstract

During the last decade, there has been an efficient use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in different fields such as environmental surveillance, military, disaster management, medical, etc. In these applications, large number of sensor nodes are deployed, which work in harsh environment. The main objective of the wireless sensor nodes is to observe the event and inform the same to other node or to sink. There are some applications in the wireless sensor networks which require exact time of the event occurrence. Such applications require that nodes of the WSN should be synchronized with global clock. In this paper, we study the impact of time synchronization and analyze various time synchronization protocols highlighting their features, objectives and perform qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Keywords: Delay, offset, skew, time synchronization.

Graphical Abstract