Time synchronisation with improved accuracy for TDMA-based wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used for a variety of applications in many areas, including tasks that involve burdensome monitoring and tracking tasks for human, environmental and various other industrial processes. For the system to operate efficiently, the multiple access protocol should be robust to minimise the packet loss rate in crowded wireless channels. The time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol is one of the solutions for wider coverage, having a significant number of nodes while maintaining relatively high efficiency. In TDMA, synchronisation among nodes is a crucial issue since a fixed period of time is allocated for data transmission for each node. This paper proposes a synchronisation algorithm with improved estimation accuracy for systems based on the TDMA protocol. The performance and the effectiveness of the proposed method have been tested and verified on the hardware module in the real channel environments.