Soft Computing Based Fine Tuning and Clock Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we focus on the various aspects related to synchronization in wireless sensor networks, their features and how to increase the lifetime of the sensor and network nodes. The focus is about clock synchronization, delay measurement in time synchronization and fine grained network time synchronization. The recent advancements in the sensor technology has led to the miniaturization of the sensors and its related components, and similarly reduced the cost to a larger extent. This enabled an active rise in the research of large scale networks of sensors. The synchronization of sensor nodes is critical to its effective operation especially the time synchronization, for the data fusion, duty cycling and so on. Most of the algorithms for synchronization that were proposed recently do the same work. The server periodically sends a piece of information or message that contains the current value of clock to the client. This happens in case of time synchronization of the sensor nodes. The proper definition for sensor networks comes as follows. It is a special type of ad-hoc network, in which the nodes, also referred to ass wireless devices get together and the form a network without any need for underlying infrastructure spontaneously. They can cooperate only by forwarding packets to each other since there are no routers in an environment without any infrastructure. When the environment is distributed in nature, then more complex is the scenario. But time synchronization is an important component of such distributed environments. It aims to provide a common time for the local clocks in their network (Sivrikaya and Yener in IEEE Netw 18(4):45–50, 2004). For applications of networking protocols, at any particular instant, there should be a common view of the clock in the network.