An energy efficient time synchronization protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks using clustering

During the past decade, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has been enormously used in various fields such as military, environmental and traffic monitoring, home monitoring, medical, space and undersea exploration. These applications require deployment of sensors which detect or sense data from environment and relay this information to the base station or central unit. The sensors operate autonomously so left unattended in hostile environment. To detect exact event time, the clocks of individual nodes need to be synchronized with global clock time. Therefore time synchronization is very important for efficient and stable WSN. It requires accurate time stamping of events and coordination between the sensor nodes. Time Synchronization algorithms tackle different factors but synchronizing accuracy and energy conservation are major issues in WSNs which helps to prolong the lifetime of network. This paper presents a Nearest Neighbour Node clustering algorithm which conserves energy alongside accuracy while synchronizing the network. The simulation result shows that this algorithm has better performance than existing time synchronization algorithm TPSN.