10 April 2013, h.11:00 - Sala 201 DEI/A

Abstract:

The accurate and efficient operation of many applications and protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) require synchronized notion of time. In order to achieve network-wide time synchronization, a common strategy is to flood current time information of a reference node into the network. In this talk, we reveal the major drawbacks of the recent flooding based time synchronization schemes in the WSN world: demanding rapid-flooding or keeping track of the neighboring nodes, even worse, a common shortcoming of having considerable overhead in terms of computation and memory allocation. We ask the question of whether it is possible to achieve high quality time synchronization without having these drawbacks. We answer this question positively by introducing a novel time synchronization protocol whose main component is “adaptive-value tracking”. In the light of our experimental evaluation in a testbed of 20 MICAz sensor nodes, we observed that the proposed protocol provides identical synchronization with an approximately 97% less CPU overhead and 80% less memory allocation when compared to the recent flooding based time synchronization schemes in WSNs.

Biography:

Kasım Sinan Yıldırım received the B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering from Ege University, Izmir, Turkey in 2003, 2006 and 2012 respectively. He worked as a software engineer in Beko Electronics R&D between 2003 and 2007, and as a research assistant at Computer Engineering Department of Ege University between 2007 and 2013. He is currently an assistant professor at the same department. His research interests are embedded systems, operating systems, distributed systems/algorithms and time synchronization in wireless sensor networks.