THIS IS A CONTINUATION OF N00014-12-1-1055 - Distributed Synchronization in Communication Networks
Abstract
Project Summary Project title: Distributed Synchronization in Communication Networks Principal Investigator: A. Kevin Tang at Cornell University Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) has been widely expected to be a critical military infrastruc- ture technology due to the growing demands for mobile and pervasive computing. For instance, military solders in a battle eld or on a ship can communicate in order to coordinate their ac- tions, without using a base station. Military interest to this area has been very high and still increasing. Take US Navy as an example, The Networks and Communication Systems Branch of the Information Technology Division (ITD) at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory pays close attention to this area. The research e orts there emphasize the development and adaptation of communication and networking technology to meet U.S. Navy and Department of Defense (DoD) requirements. (See http://cs.itd.nrl.navy.mil/work/manet/index.php for concrete details). Despite many di erent types of such networks, the need for coordination among mobile agents is ubiquitous. Coordination is needed in order to perform time consistent measurements to track targets, to communicate between di erent agents in the network without interfering one another, and to set up awake communication periods that overlap enough in order to save energy and keep connectivity. Underlying all these is the fundamental requirement to achieve synchronization, in a distributed manner. This is however a daunting task given all the possible (and ever changing) network topology and varying delay among agents. In this proposal, we focus on a class of powerful models with many merits including energy e ciency and convergence time, the models of coupled oscillators. The objective of this project is two-fold. First, to broaden and deepen the fundamental understanding of such systems by relaxing the standard restrictive assumptions on topology (whom to connect), coupling (how to connect) and delay (when to connect). A better understanding of these factors is needed in order to predict the behavior of the system. We present signi cant advance on related topics and propose promising future research directions. The second part is on the impact of this project to DoD capabilities via distributed synchronization and scheduling protocol design. In particular, we propose to design distributed synchronization protocols that meet practical constraints in MANETs for DoD missions. For example, previously, when the natural frequencies of the oscil- lators are di erent, synchronization algorithms may not converge. Instead, based on our results, we propose a new algorithm that can overcome this di culty. We also propose to develop a distributed TDMA protocol to perform distributed scheduling among mobile agents. This proposal includes signi cant preliminary results from the PI s group. We have also se- cured necessary facilities and support from Cornell as the basic platform to perform this research. Furthermore, The PI has been collaborating with IBM for three years. IBM has keen interested in clock synchronization algorithms for distributed computer networks for almost a decade. Finally, to develop testing prototypes, the PI plans to apply to the ONR-ASEE Summer Faculty Research Program to spend some time in the Naval Research Laboratory (See http://onr.asee.org/).
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jun 03, 2016
- Source ID
- N000141612150
Entities
People
- Ao Tang
Organizations
- Cornell University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy