Simulation and Performance Analysis of the IEEE1588 PTP with Kalman Filtering in Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks
Baoqiang Lv, Yiwen Huang, Taihua Li, Xuewu Dai, Muxi He, Wuxiong Zhang, Yang Yang · Journal of Networks · 2014
Abstract—As the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) find wider and wider applications, time synchronization has emerged as a key technology to improve network performance and enable WSNs in time-sensitive applications. The recently proposed IEEE 1588 Precision Time Synchronization Protocol (PTP) has shown its capability for the wired Ethernet, but its performance in multi-hop WSNs is still an open question. This is because of the non-negligible asymmetric delays caused by the wireless media access control protocol, low-cost crystal oscillators and time-stamping uncertainties due to limited resources in WSNs nodes. This paper studies the performance of the IEEE 1588 in a multi-hop WSNs by state-space modeling and realistic simulation. Furthermore, the Kalman filter is introduced to improve the offset and skew estimation. The realistic simulator was developed on the OMNeT++ discrete event simulation platform and the simulation results show that the proposed Kalman filtering improves the performance of time synchronization in multi-hop WSNs in terms of offset and skew estimation.