Multi-hop time synchronization for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Time synchronization plays an important role in UANs, which need fine-grained coordination among nodes. Precise time synchronization is also needed for a variety of other coordinate tasks in UANs such as data fusion, TDMA scheduling, localization, power-saving and so on. Recently, time synchronization protocol for point-to-point with high propagation delay has been proposed, while time synchronization for multi-hop UANs is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose a multi-hop time synchronization scheme for Underwater Acoustic Networks (MSUAN). MSUAN includes three stages. In the first stage, we assign each node a level by establishing a path to the reference node. During the second phase, nodes realize synchronization by receiving synchronization packets both from it´s parent node and neighboring nodes. The third stage re-synchronizes nodes because the clock may drift away without synchronization for long time. Mathematical analysis of MSUAN´s synchronization error shows that the more time-stamps we get, the more accurate skew we will get. At the end, we use OPNET to simulate MSUAN, and the simulation result under pyramid topology shows that even the hop accumulates to 8, for MSUAN, the average offset error is maintained at about 58us and the average skew error is below 2ppm.