One improved time synchronization based on Ant Colony Optimization and TPSN mechanism

The time synchronization, as one primary technology for distributed networks, is necessary to cooperative measure, data fused and target location. With the development of wireless sensor networks, the applications require that the precision of time synchronization is more and more accurate. In this paper, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is used to improve the performance of time synchronization based on Time-Sync Protocol for Sensor Networks (TPSN). ACO reduces the synchronization clock deviation and increases the precision of time synchronization about 10%. Compared with traditional TPSN mechanism, simulation shows that the ACO Time Synchronization (ACO-TS) can remove the accidental error, speed up the convergence of time synchronization and optimize the synchronization distributing 5~10%. The experiment dedicates that the ACO-TS approach can get a time synchronization precision at 2~8¿s in a five-hop range in hierarchy wireless sensor networks based on ZigBee protocol.