A time-synchronized ZigBee building network for smart water management

Abstract

Water management is an important issue in economics and environment. Recently, amount of water control system has been proposed and developed. For the type of intelligent water control, the related parameters will be the input of the control system. Hence, there is a need of developing a scalable, flexible and reliable sensor network for related parameters monitoring. To install and replace water sensors in building networks, wireless connection will be the first priority. However, improper time synchronization in the network will cause packet loss and long latency which degrades the network performance. In this paper, time-synchronized ZigBee building network (TS-ZBN) is proposed for water management. The node-to-node time synchronization is proposed. The concept is to calculate the clock difference by studying the propagation delay model. The simulation result shows that the mean synchronization error and variance are low.