Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have received considerable attention in recent years because of its broad area of applications. In the same breadth, it also faces many challenges. Time synchronization is one of those fundamental challenges faced by WSN being a distributed system. Several approaches have been proposed in the last decade for time synchronization in WSNs. Recently, Consensus Time Synchronization (CTS) approaches are gaining popularity due its computational lightness, robustness and distributed nature. Though a rich set of CTS algorithms are proposed, their energy consumption has so far not been studied. Apart from synchronization precision, energy consumption should also be considered meticulously for time synchronization algorithms in energy-constraint WSNs. In this paper, a thorough energy consumption analysis is presented for some recent state-of-the-art CTS algorithms for WSN and tested by simulation. The simulation results will help in selecting an appropriate CTS algorithm that meets the requirements of synchronization accuracy and energy consumption for a specific WSN application.
Energy Consumption Analysis of Consensus Time Synchronization Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks