Accuracy and Duty-Cycle of FTSP on a LPL-MAC

Abstract

Synchronization accuracy and energy efficiency are two of the most important requirements of a synchronization protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Typically, synchronization protocols for WSNs like FTSP rely on periodic message exchange in order to achieve a sufficient level of accuracy. A higher accuracy therefore comes at the expense of an increased energy consumption. In this paper, we introduce an analytic framework aimed at analyzing how accuracy and energy consumption are affected by the synchronization period and the radio duty cycle, using the example of FTSP running on top of a low-power listening (LPL) MAC protocol. The model exposes the hidden dependencies between protocol parameters and application requirements, which allows for using standard tools to generate feasible as well as optimal protocol configurations.