Performance comparison on network-wide time synchronization approaches in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received a lot of attention recently due to their enormous potential in different applications. As in all distributed systems, time synchronization is very important in a sensor network since the design of many protocols and implementation of applications require precise time. In this article, we first gave some basic background knowledge about time synchronization. Then we introduced several typical network-wide time synchronization protocols. At last, we compared their performances according to the some previous simulation results.