Abstract
Time synchronization plays a key role in wireless sensor networks. Time synchronization is realized by those messages that are time-stamped. But there are several delay times during transmission after time stamping. These delay times are uncertain and contribute directly to synchronization error. Therefore, we aim at studying the influence of uncertainties on time synchronization in this paper. The uncertainties include encoding time, decoding time, propagation time, and system calls. We would like to compare and evaluate the performance of various time synchronization protocols under various uncertainties. In addition, we study how those protocols can reduce or eliminate the effect of uncertainties.