Efficient RBS in Sensor Networks

Sensor networks have emerged as an interesting and important research area in the last few years. In order to construct a wireless sensor network, synchronization of base stations is very important. As the synchronization mechanisms based on the purpose of the sensor network, the RBS (reference broadcast synchronization) and TDP (time-diffusion synchronization protocol) have been proposed. This paper compared and analyzed the performance of the RBS and TDP mechanisms according to the number of generated messages, the elapsed time for overall synchronization, the number of nodes to be synchronized from a reference node and the number of reference nodes in the wireless sensor network. In the simulation results based on the number of generated messages and the elapsed time in overall synchronization, TDP is far better than RBS. But, in the environments with small number of nodes, RBS is far more accurate than TDP. So, if it requires only few base nodes in the network and the more high synchronization accuracy is necessary, RBS mechanism is more preferable. However, the RBS has a disadvantage that does not consider energy requirement of sensor nodes and a new E-RBS (Efficient RBS) is proposed. E-RBS decreases the number of messages to be processed and saves the energy consumption, with a range of an acceptable accuracy. So, E-RBS can be used efficiently in such an environment as small home/office sensor networks with small base nodes