  Average consensus theory is intensely popular for building time
synchronization in wireless sensor network (WSN). However, the average
consensus-based time synchronization algorithm is based on iteration that pose
challenges for efficiency, as they entail high communication cost and long
convergence time in large-scale WSN. Based on the suggestion that the greater
the algebraic connectivity leads to the faster the convergence, a novel
multi-hop average consensus time synchronization (MACTS) is developed with
innovative implementation in this paper. By employing multi-hop communication
model, it shows that virtual communication links among multi-hop nodes are
generated and algebraic connectivity of network increases. Meanwhile, a
multihop controller is developed to balance the convergence time, accuracy and
communication complexity. Moreover, the accurate relative clock offset
estimation is yielded by delay compensation. Implementing the MACTS based on
the popular one-way broadcast model and taking multi-hop over short distances,
we achieve hundreds of times the MACTS convergence rate compared to ATS.
