Timing-sync protocol for sensor networks
Summary (4 min read)
1. INTRODUCTION
- Advances in microelectronics fabrication have allowed the integration of sensing, processing and wireless communication capabilities into low-cost and small form-factor embedded systems called sensor nodes [1], [2].
- The need for unobtrusive and remote monitoring is the main motivation for deploying a sensing and communication network (sensor network) consisting of a large number of these battery-powered nodes.
- The target tracking applications use Kalman filter to estimate the target position [3].
- For such class of applications, the synchronization of the complete network with every node maintaining a unique global time scale becomes paramount.
- Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.
1.1 Contributions
- The authors present a Timing-sync Protocol for Sensor Networks (TPSN) that works on the conventional approach of senderreceiver synchronization.
- Postfacto synchronization is used to synchronize two nodes by extrapolating backwards to estimate the phase shift at a previous time.
- On the other hand, to facilitate deployment of MAC protocols such as TDMA, there might be a need of maintaining a unique and global timescale throughout the network.
- The authors will show that TPSN provides a simple, scalable and efficient solution to the problem of timing synchronization in sensor networks.
- Moreover, TPSN is completely flexible and can be easily tuned to meet the desired levels of accuracy as well as algorithmic overhead.
3. SYSTEM MODEL
- This is the only notion of time that a node has.
- The authors provide an integrated algorithm that aims at providing time synchronization following the always-on model.
- Thus, the goal is to establish a common timescale for every node in the sensor network and therefore, synchronize the 16-bit clock for every sensor node.
- The authors begin by describing the basic concept of TPSN and proceed to outline the assumptions about the system.
3.1 Basic Concept
- The first step of the algorithm is to create a hierarchical topology in the network.
- Every node is assigned a level in this hierarchical structure.
- Eventually every node is synchronized to the root node and the authors achieve network-wide time synchronization.
- In more hostile environments, where it is impossible to have an external entity, sensor nodes can periodically take over the functionality of being the root node, using some leader election algorithm [12].
- Also, neither TPSN nor the “always-on” model restricts the possibility of having multiple root nodes in the network.
3.2 Assumptions
- The authors assume that the sensor nodes have unique identifiers.
- A link level protocol ensures that each node is aware of the set of nodes with which it can directly communicate, also termed as the “neighbor set” of the node.
- Though there can be unidirectional links in the network, TPSN uses only bi-directional links to do pair wise synchronization between a set of nodes.
- The authors have attributed the creation and maintenance of the hierarchical structure as the responsibilities of TPSN.
- Many of the sensor network applications rely on in-network processing and require a similar structure for their functionality for example the aggregation tree required for TinyDB [13].
4.1 Level Discovery Phase
- This phase of the algorithm occurs at the onset, when the network is deployed.
- The immediate neighbors of the root node receive this packet and assign themselves a level, one greater than the level they have received i.e., level 1.
- The authors explain how to handle such special cases in Section 4.3.
- The authors use a simple flooding mechanism to create the hierarchical structure.
- Instead, the authors could have used more accurate minimum spanning tree algorithms.
4.2 Synchronization Phase
- Pair wise synchronization is performed along the edges of the hierarchical structure established in the earlier phase.
- Let us first analyze, how a two-way message exchange between a pair of nodes can synchronize them.
- At time T1, ‘A’ sends a synchronization_pulse packet to ‘B’.
- On hearing this message, nodes in level 2 back off for some random time, after which they initiate the message exchange with nodes in level 1.
- This randomization is to ensure that nodes in level 2 start the synchronization phase after nodes in level 1 have been synchronized.
4.3 Special Provisions
- In a sensor network, the nodes are usually deployed in a random fashion.
- It has already been explained that in order to handle collisions, a node would retransmit the synchronization_pulse after some random amount of time.
- On getting back a reply, the node is assigned a new level.
- The validity of this heuristic has been verified via simulations.
- This new root node starts from the beginning and reruns the level discovery phase.
5. ERROR ANALYSIS OF TPSN
- The authors characterize the possible sources of error and present a detailed mathematically analysis for TPSN.
- The authors concentrate on pair wise synchronization between two nodes.
- The authors compare the performance of their scheme to RBS [7], an algorithm that synchronizes a set of receivers in sensor networks.
- As will be clear from their analysis, the results can be in general extended to make a comparison between the classical approach of sender-receiver synchronization and receiver-receiver synchronization.
5.1 Decomposition of Packet Delay
- Figure 2 shows the decomposition of packet delay when it traverses over a wireless link between two sensor nodes.
- This time includes the delay incurred by the packet to reach the MAC layer from the application layer.
- The variations in reception delay would even be smaller if the sensor node employs a hardware based RF transceiver [14].
- In Figure2, the size used for different boxes is just to give an intuition about the absolute value of each component.
- Secondly, communication takes place in bits and a node optimizes by performing events in parallel.
5.2 Error Analysis
- The authors will contrast TPSN to RBS by analyzing the sources of error for both the schemes.
- The authors represent the times measured by local node clocks in Figure 1, such as T1, in real time by using lowercase letters.
- Note that T1 and T2 are times measured by node clocks of A and B respectively.
- Here SUC, RUC and PUC stand for the uncertainty at sender, at receiver and in propagation time respectively.
- As can be seen from equations 10 and 15, the two contributing factors towards the synchronization error for both TPSN and RBS are the variation in packet delays and the drift among the local clock of motes.
5.2.1 Variation in packet delays
- As can be observed from equation 15, RBS completely eliminates the uncertainty at the sender side.
- However in the case of sensor networks there exist a strong coupling between the radio and the application layer.
- Let us assume the best-case scenario for RBS, when the variation in propagation time is the same as in TPSN, equal to η time units.
- Thus, even for a similar system, TPSN provides a 2x better performance as compared to RBS.
- As can be observed from the last terms on RHS of equation 10 and 15, all the authors care about is just the relative drift between the two nodes.
5.2.3 Conclusion
- As can be seen from the above analysis, TPSN would give roughly a 2x better performance for all the sources of error as compared to RBS.
- TPSN has an added contribution from the uncertainty at the sender whereas RBS completely removes this as a source of error.
- This analysis can be extended to comparison between sender-receiver and receiver-receiver synchronization based algorithms in general.
- By having the flexibility of time stamping the packets at the MAC layer, the authors remove this critical source of error.
- The authors have shown this via a detailed analysis and they verify their claim by implementing TPSN and RBS on motes.
Did you find this useful? Give us your feedback
Citations
5,626 citations
Cites methods from "Timing-sync protocol for sensor net..."
...Timing-sync protocol for sensor network (TPSN): TPSN [70] provides time synchronization for every sensor node in the network....
[...]
...The performance of TPSN was compared against the reference broadcast synchronization (RBS) [71] approach which is based on a receiver–receiver synchronization....
[...]
...When a new leader is elected, TPSN is run again with the level discovery phase....
[...]
...TPSN is based on a conventional sender–receiver synchronization approach....
[...]
...Results show that TPSN is two times better than RBS. Clock-sampling mutual network synchronization (CSMNS): CSMNS [72] is a distributed and autonomous network synchronization approach....
[...]
2,267 citations
Cites background or methods from "Timing-sync protocol for sensor net..."
...We shall use the following decomposition of the sources of the message delivery delays first introduced by Kopetz and Ochsenreiter [7], [8] and later extended in [3] and [5]....
[...]
...The TPSN approach [3] eliminates the access time, byte alignment time and propagation time by making use of the implicit acknowledgments to transmit information back to the sender....
[...]
...The TPSN achieves two times better performance than RBS by time-stamping the radio messages in the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer of the radio stack [3] and by relying on a two-way message exchange....
[...]
...MAC layer time-stamping can eliminate many of the errors, as observed in [16] and [3]....
[...]
...The proposed algorithm compensates for the relevant error sources by utilizing the concepts of MAC layer time-stamping [3], [7] and skew compensation with linear regression [2]....
[...]
2,065 citations
1,195 citations
1,088 citations
References
3,166 citations
3,044 citations
"Timing-sync protocol for sensor net..." refers background in this paper
...Advances in microelectronics fabrication have allowed the integration of sensing, processing and wireless communication capabilities into low-cost and small form-factor embedded systems called sensor nodes [1], [2]....
[...]
2,931 citations
"Timing-sync protocol for sensor net..." refers background or methods in this paper
...725cm) is better than the average accuracy obtained in [20]....
[...]
...A common approach of doing localization in sensor networks is to use ultrasonic ranging [20]....
[...]
...In [20], authors abstract the timing synchronization part by subtracting the time they receive the radio signal, from the time of receipt of the ultrasonic signal....
[...]
2,537 citations
2,227 citations
"Timing-sync protocol for sensor net..." refers background in this paper
...Advances in microelectronics fabrication have allowed the integration of sensing, processing and wireless communication capabilities into low-cost and small form-factor embedded systems called sensor nodes [1], [2]....
[...]
Related Papers (5)
Frequently Asked Questions (12)
Q2. What scheme could be used to maintain a relative clock between the adjacent nodes?
a scheme such as RBS [7] could be used to maintain a relative clock between the adjacent nodes that lie on the boundary, providing synchronization in the whole network.
Q3. What is the main motivation for deploying a sensor network?
The need for unobtrusive and remote monitoring is the main motivation for deploying a sensing and communication network (sensor network) consisting of a large number of these battery-powered nodes.
Q4. What are the applications of sensor networks?
The applications envisioned for sensor networks vary from monitoring inhospitable habitats and disaster areas to operating indoors for intrusion detection and equipment monitoring.
Q5. What is the main reason for the use of sensor networks?
Advances in microelectronics fabrication have allowed the integration of sensing, processing and wireless communication capabilities into low-cost and small form-factor embedded systems called sensor nodes [1], [2].
Q6. how do you remove the critical source of error in a sensor network?
However in case of sensor networks, by having the flexibility of time stamping the packets at the MAC layer, the authors remove this critical source of error.
Q7. How many nodes will have a new level in the hierarchy?
Assuming the network is still connected, the node will have at least one node in its neighbor set and thus it will surely be assigned a new level in the hierarchy.
Q8. How many times would a node retransmit the synchronization pulse?
It has already been explained that in order to handle collisions, a node would retransmit the synchronization_pulse after somerandom amount of time.
Q9. What is the best-case scenario for RBS?
Let us assume the best-case scenario for RBS, when the variation in propagation time is the same as in TPSN, equal to η time units.
Q10. What is the need of maintaining a unique and global timescale throughout the network?
On the other hand, to facilitate deployment of MAC protocols such as TDMA, there might be a need of maintaining a unique and global timescale throughout the network.
Q11. What is the importance of time synchronization in the implementation of MAC protocols?
Time synchronization is also indispensable in the implementation of the commonly used medium access control (MAC) protocols such as TDMA [4].
Q12. What is the way to measure the performance of a multihop network?
The authors provide an implementation on motes that integrates TPSN with post-facto synchronization and gauge its performance on a multihop network of motes.