Fast Convergence Time Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Average Consensus

Average consensus theory is intensely popular for building time synchronization in wireless sensor network (WSN). However, the average consensus-based time synchronization algorithm is based on iteration that pose challenges for efficiency, as they entail high communication cost and long convergence time in large-scale WSN. Based on the suggestion that the greater the algebraic connectivity leads to the faster the convergence, a novel multi-hop average consensus time synchronization (MACTS) is developed with innovative implementation in this paper. By employing multi-hop communication model, it shows that virtual communication links among multi-hop nodes are generated and algebraic connectivity of network increases. Meanwhile, a multihop controller is developed to balance the convergence time, accuracy and communication complexity. Moreover, the accurate relative clock offset estimation is yielded by delay compensation. Implementing the MACTS based on the popular one-way broadcast model and taking multi-hop over short distances, we achieve hundreds of times the MACTS convergence rate compared to ATS.