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. 2013 Aug 20;13(8):10981-1006.
doi: 10.3390/s130810981.

Temperature-compensated clock skew adjustment

Jose María Castillo-Secilla  1 , Jose Manuel Palomares, Joaquín Olivares
Affiliations

Temperature-compensated clock skew adjustment

Jose María Castillo-Secilla et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

This work analyzes several drift compensation mechanisms in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Temperature is an environmental factor that greatly affects oscillators shipped in every WSN mote. This behavior creates the need of improving drift compensation mechanisms in synchronization protocols. Using the Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol (FTSP), this work demonstrates that crystal oscillators are affected by temperature variations. Thus, the influence of temperature provokes a low performance of FTSP in changing conditions of temperature. This article proposes an innovative correction factor that minimizes the impact of temperature in the clock skew. By means of this factor, two new mechanisms are proposed in this paper: the Adjusted Temperature (AT) and the Advanced Adjusted Temperature (A2T). These mechanisms have been combined with FTSP to produce AT-FTSP and A2T-FTSP. Both have been tested in a network of TelosB motes running TinyOS. Results show that both AT-FTSP and A2T-FTSP improve the average synchronization errors compared to FTSP and other temperature-compensated protocols (Environment-Aware Clock Skew Estimation and Synchronization for WSN (EACS) and Temperature Compensated Time Synchronization (TCTS)).

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Temperature influence in Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol (FTSP).
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Clock skew in Citizen CMR200T
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Behavior study: 9°C–22°C.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Low temperature results.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Intermediate temperature results.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.
Behavior study: 22°C–32°C.
Figure 7.
Figure 7.
High temperature results.
Figure 8.
Figure 8.
Behavior study: 22°C–40°C.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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