Time synchronization for wireless sensor networks on CC2530

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are widely employed in many fields to collect data or control remote equipments. For data acquisition and some globally synchronized media access control (MAC) protocols, time information plays an important role in the system. This paper presents the work on how to effectively achieve time synchronization between two adjacent nodes on a real platform. To reduce the timing error, we develop our own program instead of relying on the existing Zigbee protocol suit. To mitigate the issue of timing drift, we need to periodically execute the synchronization task and perform timing compensation at the slave node. Experiment results show that the average timing error is about 4.28us when the synchronization interval is 16.384 seconds.