Application of Multi-hop Time synchronization on a Network of AUVs Performing Lawn Mower Trajectory

This paper presents a use case of multi-hop time synchronization for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) performing lawn mower trajectory. The work showcases a time synchronization protocol that could address mobility in multi-hop underwater scenarios. An existing time synchronization protocol named Doppler-Enhanced time synchronization (DE-sync) protocol is chosen and extended to an application-specific multi-hop scenario. It further considers the error analysis in the elapsed time duration after message exchanges in each hop. Simulations have been performed using MATLAB. It is observed that DE-sync shows better performance in terms of synchronization error than the other similar protocols. It is also found that error increases with the number of hops but with limited bounds.