2012 IEEE GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS CONFERENCE (GLOBECOM)

This paper describes and validates an extension to the widely used Flooding Time Synchronisation Protocol (FTSP) namely Dynamic Flooding Time Synchronisation Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. The extension enhances FTSP by dynamically optimising communication exchange with the dual aim of conserving energy whilst improving accuracy. This optimisation is realised by altering the transmission rate of motes based on real-time monitoring and the WSN application accuracy requirements. The proposed mechanism, thus, eliminates the need with FTSP to determine and pre-configure a suitable transmission interval for a particular environment. Our results show that the proposed protocol extension can perform as well as FTSP in a stable temperature environment and can achieve similar accuracies with a much reduced (up to 75 percent) number of transmissions in an environment whereby motes are exposed to temperature fluctuations.