Low-Energy Sensor Network Time Synchronization as an Emergent Property

The primary contribution of this work is to examine the energy efficiency of pulse coupled oscillation for time synchronization in a realistic wireless network environment and to explore the impact of mobility on convergence rate. Energy coupled oscillation is susceptible to interference; this approach uses reception and decoding of short packet bursts to eliminate this problem. The energy efficiency of a commonly used timestamp broadcast algorithm is compared and contrasted with pulse-coupled oscillation. The emergent pulse coupled oscillation technique shows greater energy efficiency as well as robustness with mobility. A proportion of the sensors may be integrated with GPS receivers in order to obtain a master clock time.