Time Synchronization for Mobile Underwater Sensor Networks

Time synchronization is very crucial for the implementation of energy constricted underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSN). The purpose of this paper is to present a time synchronization algorithm which is suitable to UWSN. Although several time synchronization protocols have been developed, most of them tend to break down when implemented on mobile underwater sensor networks. In this paper, we analyze the effect of node mobility, and propose a Mobile Counteracted Time Synchronization approach, called “Mc-Sync”, which is a novel time synchronization scheme for mobile underwater acoustic sensor networks. It makes use of two mobile reference nodes to counteract the effect of node mobility. We also analyze and design the optimized trajectories of the two mobile reference nodes in underwater environment. We show through analysis and simulation that Mc-Sync provides much better performance than existing schemes.