Since time synchronization can consume a lot of energy, a
tunable time synchronization service is applicable for some applications.
Nevertheless, there are needs for both type of synchronization protocols.
The above challenges provide a guideline for developing various types of
time synchronization protocols that are applicable to the sensor networks. A
time synchronization protocol may have a mixture of these design features.
In addition, some applications in the sensor networks may not require the
time synchronization protocol to meet all these requirements. For example, a
data gathering application may require the tunable service and light-weight
features more than the server-less capability. The tunable service and lightweight
features allow the application to gather precise data when the users
require it. In addition, the nodes that are not part of this data gathering
process may not have to be synchronized. Also, the precision of the time does
not need to be high, because the users may only need milliseconds precision
to satisfy their needs.
As these design challenges are important for guiding the development of
a time synchronization protocol, the reader still needs to acquire the fundamentals
of time synchronization. These fundamentals are discussed in Section
5.
5 Time Synchronization Fundamentals
As the factors described in Section 3 influence the error budget of the synchronized
clocks, the purpose of a time synchronization protocol is to minimize the
e?®ects of these factors.
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