Multi-hop Time Synchronization and Power Saving Mechanisms for FRACTEL

The FRACTEL project makes use of long distance wireless links to connect rural and inaccessible areas to a nearby city providing internet, voice and video connectivity. We shall use high gain directional antennas and sectorized antennas for long distance communication over off-the-shelf WiFi hard- ware. Shorter distance links extend this connectivity to nearby locations. To support long distance links and quality of service requirements, we shall run a TDMA schedule over the FRAC- TEL infrastructure. In this project, we look at the issues of node synchronization which is critical for correct working of the TDMA schedule. Since FRACTEL has a tree topology, we can perform synchronization between two levels at a time and finally get the entire network to know the global clock time. Another aspect of this project is to optimize the power utiliza- tion of the nodes. We shall use a proxy based wakeup mech- anism to let the main devices sleep while another low power device stays awake and listens for any wakeup calls. When it receives such a signal, it wakes up the main board. In this re- port, we discuss the steps taken so far in these aspects and the path ahead.