Master-Slave Mutual Time Synchronization in a Wireless Body Area Network

Time synchronization plays a crucial role in every distributed system and is particularly critical in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), composed of several motes connected with different sensors. For health status monitoring applications using a star-topology to reduce the number of employed units, often the master node also integrates some sensors. In this paper we discuss in detail the issues associated with the inclusion of the master in the synchronization procedure, proposing a strategy that guarantees the complete master/slave synchronization. The proposed technique can be employed concurrently with every protocol which does not embed network time synchronization features.