Synchronization Protocols and Implementation Issues in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Review
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Date
2015
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Publisher
IEEE
Abstract
Time synchronization in wireless sensor networks
(WSNs) is a topic that has been attracting the research community
in the last decade. Most performance evaluations of the proposed
solutions have been limited to theoretical analysis and simulation.
They consequently ignored several practical aspects, e.g., packet
handling jitters, clock drifting, packet loss, and mote limitations,
which affect real implementation on sensor motes. Authors of some
pragmatic solutions followed empirical approaches for the evaluation,
where the proposed solutions have been implemented on real
motes and evaluated in testbed experiments. This paper gives an
insight on issues related to the implementation of synchronization
protocols in WSN. The challenges related to WSN environment
are presented; the importance of real implementation and testbed
evaluation are motivated by some experiments we conducted. The
most relevant implementations of the literature are then reviewed,
discussed, and qualitatively compared. While there are several
survey papers that present and compare the protocols from the
conception perspectives, as well as others that deal with mathematical
and signal processing issues of the estimators, a survey on
practical aspects related to the implementation is missing. To our
knowledge, this paper is the first one that takes into account the
practical aspect of existing solutions.
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Keywords
Computer networks, sensor systems, wireless communication, wireless networks, wireless sensor networks