Time Synchronization with Oceanic Movement Pattern in Underwater Wireless Networks

Time synchronization in underwater environment is challenging due to high propagation delay and mobility of sensor nodes. Previous researches do not consider practical issues affecting on the accuracy of time synchronization such as high-channel access delay and relative position between sensor nodes. Also, those protocols using bidirectional message exchange shorten the network lifetime and decrease the network throughput because numerous transmission, reception and unnecessary overhearing can be occurred. Therefore, in our research, we suggest enhanced time synchronization based on features of underwater environment. It controls the instant of transmission by exploiting the feature of an oceanic movement and node deployment. Moreover, the protocol uses more accurate time information by removing channel access delay from the timestamp. The proposed scheme is also practical on the underwater sensor network requiring low-power consumption because the scheme conducts time-synchronization with smaller transmission and reception compared with previous works. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed protocol deceases time error by 2.5ms and 0.56ms compared with TSHL and MU-Sync respectively, reducing energy consumption by 68.4%.