A Position Prediction-Assisted Two-Way Time Synchronization Algorithm for Highly Mobile Networks

Abstract

The two-way time transfer is a widely used method to realize time synchronization for a network. Nonetheless, the high mobility of an Ad Hoc causes asymmetric link propagation delays, deteriorating the synchronization performance consequently. In this paper, we investigate the two-way time synchronization in high-mobility scenarios and propose a novel position prediction-assisted synchronization scheme. Specifically, the Kalman filter is utilized to estimate the position and velocities for all nodes. On this basis, we can obtain the propagation delay errors for asymmetric links caused by high mobility. Then, the prediction-based delay error is compensated to the actual case. Relevant simulation results show that our proposal can bring down the propagation delay error dramatically for highly mobile scenarios. Our findings provide some insights into the time synchronization of highly mobile Ad Hoc networks.