Author(s)

Pablo Briff, Ariel Lutenberg, Leonardo Rey Vega, Fabian Vargas

CONICET, National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Buenos Aires, Argentina； LPSC, Faculty of Engineering, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Embedded Systems Laboratory, Faculty of Engineering, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Embedded Systems Laboratory, Faculty of Engineering, University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina； CONICET, National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Signals and Systems for Computing Group, Faculty of Engineering, Catholic University, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

In this work, the existing trade-off between time synchronization quality and energy is studied for both large-scale and small-scale fading wireless channels. We analyze the clock offset estimation problem using one-way, two-way and N-way message exchange mechanisms affected by Gaussian and exponentially distributed impairments. Our main contribution is a general relationship between the total energy required for synchronizing a wireless sensor network and the clock offset estimation error by means of the transmit power, number of transmitted messages and average message delay, deriving the energy optimal lower bound as a function of the time synchronization quality and the number of hops in a multi-hop network.

Wireless Sensor Networks; Clock Offset Estimation; Time Synchronization; Wireless Channel Fading

P. Briff, A. Lutenberg, L. Rey Vega and F. Vargas, "On Energy-Efficient Time Synchronization for Wireless Sensors under Large-Scale and Small-Scale Fading Effects," Wireless Sensor Network, Vol. 5 No. 10, 2013, pp. 181-193. doi: 10.4236/wsn.2013.510021.