Patent ID: 7974402

Claim:
A communications system, comprising: a plurality of mobile nodes forming a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) and having a network clock time; a plurality of wireless communications links connecting the mobile nodes together; each mobile node comprising a communications device and controller for transmitting and routing data packets wirelessly to other mobile nodes via the wireless communications link using a time division multiple access (TDMA) data transmission, each mobile node communicating at a selected guard time and further comprising a clock circuit having a physical clock time, wherein a clock circuit is operative for for establishing a virtual clock time based on a timing error adjustment obtained from a clock mean value subtracted from the physical clock time, wherein said virtual clock time is processed with the physical clock time to establish a second order internal clock compensation factor as a learned and accumulated value and obtain a virtual clock drift rate that is used to correct any clock timing errors of the physical clock time from the network clock time and reduce the guard time.