In this paper, a Packet-Coupled Oscillators (PkCOs) synchronisation protocol
is proposed for time-sensitive Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) based on
Pulse-Coupled Oscillators (PCO) in mathematical biology. The effects of delays
on synchronisation performance are studied through mathematical modelling and
analysis of packet exchange and processing delays. The delay compensation
strategy (i.e., feedforward control) is utilised to cancel delays effectively.
A simple scheduling function is provided with PkCOs to allocate the packet
transmission event to a specified time slot, by configuring reference input of
the system to a non-zero value, in order to minimise the possibility of packet
collision in synchronised wireless networks. The rigorous theoretical proofs
are provided to validate the convergence and stability of the proposed
synchronisation scheme. Finally, the simulations and experiments examine the
effectiveness of PkCOs with delay compensation and scheduling strategies. The
experimental results also show that the proposed PkCOs algorithm can achieve
synchronisation with the precision of 26.3μs (1 tick)