Patent ID: 8391271

Claim:
A method of obtaining synchronization among nodes in a wireless mobile ad hoc network (MANET), comprising: maintaining, at a given node of the network, a routing table containing entries corresponding to other nodes of the network that are one or more hops away from the given node; periodically exchanging topology messages among nodes of the network for updating the routing tables at each of the nodes of the network; selecting a network master node, and defining remaining nodes that are one or more hops away from the network master node as slave nodes; including master timing information in topology messages transmitted by the network master node, wherein the master timing information corresponds to first times (T 1 ) at which the network master node received a topology message from each of the slave nodes, and a second time (td) at which the network master node sends a topology message after receiving the topology messages from each of the slave nodes; and implementing a distributed scheduling protocol for transmitting the topology messages from each of the slave nodes in order to resolve contention for channel access among each of the nodes of the network.