ABSTRACT
The objective of a Network Synchronization approach is to align the time-scales of a network of clocks. Network synchronization can be classified based on the strategy used to organize time dissemination. The two most fundamental strategies are: Masterslave, and Mutual Network Synchronization. This chapter focuses on protocols for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs). It reviews the physics of clocks and their models. The chapter reviews four protocols namely Time-sync Protocol for Sensor Networks (TPSN), Reference Broadcast Synchronization (RBS), Random Time Source, and an IWSN approach based on Kalman filters that has been implemented and tested in industrial environments. It describes some level of detail the fundamentals of mutual network synchronization and two particular protocols in this family referred to as Clock Sampling Mutual Network Synchronization and the Diffusion algorithm. TPSN is used by Dust Networks and WirelessHART standard. RBS is a receiver-receiver synchronization approach.
