Multi-Hop Clock Synchronization Based on Robust Reference Node Selection for Ship Ad-Hoc Network

Ship ad-hoc network (SANET) extends the coverage of the maritime communication among ships with the reduced cost. To fulfill the growing demands of real-time services, the SANET requires an efficient clock time synchronization algorithm which has not been carefully investigated under the ad-hoc maritime environment. This is mainly because the conventional algorithms only suggest to decrease the beacon collision probability that diminishes the clock drift among the units. However, the SANET is a very large-scale network in terms of geographic scope, e.g., with 100 km coverage. The key factor to affect the synchronization performance is the signal propagation delay, which has not being carefully considered in the existing algorithms. Therefore, it requires a robust multi-hop synchronization algorithm to support the communication among hundreds of the ships under the maritime environment. The proposed algorithm has to face and overcome several challenges, i.e., physical clock, e.g., coordinated universal time (UTC)/global positioning system (GPS) unavailable due to the atrocious weather, network link stability, and large propagation delay in the SANET. In this paper, we propose a logical clock synchronization algorithm with multi-hop function for the SANET, namely multi-hop clock synchronization for SANET (MCSS). It works in an ad-hoc manner in case of no UTC/GPS being available, and the multi-hop function makes sure the link stability of the network. For the proposed MCSS, the synchronization time reference nodes (STRNs) are efficiently selected by considering the propagation delay, and the beacon collision can be decreased by the combination of adaptive timing synchronization procedure (ATSP) with the proposed STRN selection procedure. Based on the simulation results, we finalize the multi-hop frame structure of the SANET by considering the clock synchronization, where the physical layer parameters are contrived to meet the requirements of target applications.