Abstract
In multihop wireless ad hoc networks, it is important that all mobile hosts are synchronized. Synchronization is necessary for power management and for frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) operations. IEEE 802.11 standards specify a clock synchronization protocol but this protocol suffers from the scalability problem due to its inefficiency contention mechanism. In this paper, we propose an automatic self-time-correcting procedure (ASP) to achieve clock synchronization in a multihop environment. Our ASP has two features. First, a faster host has higher priority to send its timing information out than a slower one. Second, after collecting enough timing information, a slower host can synchronize to the faster one by self-correcting its timer periodically (which makes it becoming a faster host). Simulation results show that our ASP decreases 60% the average maximum clock drift as compared to the IEEE 802.11 and reduces 99% the number of asynchronism in a large-scale multihop wireless ad hoc networks.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Chih-Min Chao A., Jang-Ping Sheu A., I-Cheng Chou (May 2006) “An Adaptive Quorum-Based Energy Conserving Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Ad Hoc Networks”. IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing, 5(5):560–570
IEEE 802.11 Standard (IEEE Computer Society LAN MAN Standards Committee), Wireless LAN Medium Access Control and Physical Layer Specifications, Aug. 1999.
G. Bianchi, L. Fratta, and M. Oliveri, “Performance Evaluation and Enhancement of the CSMA/CA MAC Protocol for 802.11 Wireless LANs”, in Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications, Tainan, Taiwan, pp. 392–396, Oct. 1996.
J. Li, C. Blake, D.S.J.D. Couto, H.I. Lee, and R. Morris, “Capacity of Ad Hoc Wireless Networks”, in Proceedings of the 7th ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, Rome, Italy, pp. 61–69, Jul. 2001.
Tay Y.C., Chua K.C. (Apr. 2001) “A Capacity Analysis for the IEEE 802.11 MAC Protocol”. ACM Wireless Networks, 7(2):159–171
L. Huang and T.H. Lai, “On the Scalability of IEEE 802.11 Ad Hoc Networks”, in Proceedings of the third ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking & Computing, Lausanne, Switzerland, pp. 173–182, Jun. 2002.
T.H. Lai and D. Zhou, “Efficient and scalable IEEE 802.11 Ad-Hoc-Mode Timing Synchronization Function”, in Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, pp. 318–323, Mar. 2003.
The Network Simulator – ns-2, http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/, 2006.
The CMU Monarch Project’s Wireless and Mobility Extensions to ns, http://www.monarch.cs.cmu.edu/, Aug. 1998.
J. Broch, D. Maltz, D. Johnson, Y. Hu, and J. Jetcheva, “A Performance Comparison of Multi-Hop Wireless Ad Hoc Network Routing Protocols”, in Proceedings of the 4th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, Dallas, TX, USA, pp. 85–97, Oct. 1998.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sheu, JP., Chao, CM., Hu, WK. et al. A Clock Synchronization Algorithm for Multihop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks. Wireless Pers Commun 43, 185–200 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-006-9217-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-006-9217-4