Bio-Inspired Time Synchronization Method for Multi-Hop Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

Time synchronization is important for frequency hopping, power management, scheduling, and basic operations of multi-hop ad-hoc networks. The main problem of existing time synchronization methods is that they depend on a particular node that has the fastest time information among neighbor nodes. The Cucker-Smale flocking model describes that global emergent behavior can be obtained by locally averaging the velocity of each bird. Inspired by this flocking model, we propose a time synchronization method not depending on a particular node. In the proposed method, each node revises its time information via the local-averaging procedure in a distributed manner. A self-correcting procedure is added to the proposed method in order to preserve the effect of time adjustment executed by the local-averaging procedure. The simulation results show that the proposed time synchronization method reduces the time difference among nodes, and enhances the performance of time synchronization in the context of IEEE 802.11-based ad-hoc networks.