A Timestamp-Free Time Synchronization Scheme Based on Reverse Asymmetric Framework for Practical Resource-Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy-efficient time synchronizations for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been put under the spotlight for years. A promising technique among which is the timestamp-free approach where no timestamps are required to establish the synchronization, thereby sparing the transmissions of the timing messages for conserving significant transmission energy. In this paper, we first investigate the feasibility of adopting timestamp-free time synchronization in practical resource-constrained WSNs; we then identify the issue of inaccuracy in maintaining the pre-defined response interval which affects the foundations of most existing timestamp-free schemes. Based on the investigation and our previously proposed reverse asymmetric time synchronization framework, we further propose an asymmetric timestamp-free time synchronization scheme with two estimation methods tailored for resource-constrained WSNs. We as well introduce the centralized and distributed multi-hop extension methods for the proposed scheme to cover diverse multi-hop scenarios. Experimental results on a real WSN testbed consisting of TelosB motes running TinyOS demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves high energy efficiency while maintaining microsecond-level time synchronization accuracy compared to three other conventional schemes.