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MU-Sync: a time synchronization protocol for underwater mobile networks

Published: 15 September 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Although there are numerous time synchronization algorithms recently proposed for terrestrial wireless sensor networks, none of these could be directly applied to underwater acoustic sensor networks. This is because they typically assume that the propagation delay is negligible, which is not the case in underwater. Furthermore, the sensor nodes in underwater tend to have some degree of mobility due to wind or ocean current, which complicates the problem even more by introducing time-varying delay.
In this paper, we propose a cluster-based synchronization algorithm for underwater acoustic mobile networks, called "MU-Sync". Our design avoids frequent re-synchronization by estimating both the clock skew and offset. As underwater mobile networks experience both time-varying and long propagation delay, previous works that estimate the clock skew using a single least square error linear regression tend to be inaccurate. In the MU-Sync, the clock skew is estimated by performing the linear regression twice over a set of local time information gathered through message exchanges. The first linear regression enables the cluster head to offset the effect of long and varying propagation delay; the second regression in turn obtains the estimated skew and offset. With the help of MAC-level time stamping, we can further reduce the nondeterministic errors that are commonly encountered by those synchronization algorithms that rely on message exchanges.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Analysis of Clock Synchronization Accuracy and Energy Consumption in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks2024 OES China Ocean Acoustics (COA)10.1109/COA58979.2024.10723612(01-08)Online publication date: 29-May-2024
  • (2024)DC-Sync: A Doppler-Compensation Time-Synchronization Scheme for Complex Mobile Underwater Sensor NetworksIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.342635712(94643-94653)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Virtual-network-reconstruction-based underwater acoustic localization framework: Theory and experiment validationOcean Engineering10.1016/j.oceaneng.2024.117114297(117114)Online publication date: Apr-2024
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      WUWNet '08: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Underwater Networks
      September 2008
      110 pages
      ISBN:9781605581859
      DOI:10.1145/1410107
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 15 September 2008

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      Author Tags

      1. clock synchronization
      2. high latency networks
      3. sensor networks
      4. underwater acoustic sensor networks

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      View all
      • (2024)Analysis of Clock Synchronization Accuracy and Energy Consumption in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks2024 OES China Ocean Acoustics (COA)10.1109/COA58979.2024.10723612(01-08)Online publication date: 29-May-2024
      • (2024)DC-Sync: A Doppler-Compensation Time-Synchronization Scheme for Complex Mobile Underwater Sensor NetworksIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.342635712(94643-94653)Online publication date: 2024
      • (2024)Virtual-network-reconstruction-based underwater acoustic localization framework: Theory and experiment validationOcean Engineering10.1016/j.oceaneng.2024.117114297(117114)Online publication date: Apr-2024
      • (2023)PTA-Sync: Packet-Train-Aided Time Synchronization for Underwater Acoustic ApplicationsApplied Sciences10.3390/app1302097813:2(978)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2023
      • (2023)Underwater 3D positioning on smart devicesProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference10.1145/3603269.3604851(33-48)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
      • (2023)Throughput Analysis on Slotted Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks With Guard TimeIEEE Sensors Journal10.1109/JSEN.2022.323278823:3(3313-3320)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2023
      • (2023)Application of Multi-hop Time synchronization on a Network of AUVs Performing Lawn Mower Trajectory2023 Fourteenth International Conference on Ubiquitous and Future Networks (ICUFN)10.1109/ICUFN57995.2023.10201060(337-342)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2023
      • (2022)A Collision-Avoided MAC Protocol With Time Synchronization and Power Control for Underwater Sensor NetworksIEEE Sensors Journal10.1109/JSEN.2022.319793622:19(19073-19087)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2022
      • (2022)DAC-Sync: Research on underwater time synchronization algorithm based on Doppler effect and clustering model2022 IEEE International Conference on Signal Processing, Communications and Computing (ICSPCC)10.1109/ICSPCC55723.2022.9984584(1-6)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2022
      • (2022)Simulation-based analysis of clock synchronization for underwater wireless sensor networksITM Web of Conferences10.1051/itmconf/2022420101542(01015)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2022
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