Collision Based Time Synchronization for Underwater Sensor Networks

Abstract

To synchronize nodes’ time in mobile underwater sensor networks, a collision based time synchronization scheme called “Coll-Sync” is proposed, which is a novel time synchronization approach for underwater acoustic environment. Collision has been identified as a major challenge to communication, and current systems implement sophisticated solutions to detect and avoid it. Coll-Sync shows that collision contains highly useful information that can be leveraged to improve time synchronization greatly. It is the first time synchronization algorithm that does not suffer but benefit from collision in underwater acoustic channel. Simulation results show that Coll-Sync has high precision and low energy cost. It significantly outperforms existing time synchronization schemes.