Burst mode symmetric double sided two way ranging

Abstract

Recently there has been a huge demand of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. A basic requirement of these applications is localization. Traditionally, nodes do not have any prior knowledge of their position when deployed. Thus a mechanism is required for nodes to determine their position. In this paper a new Time of Flight (TOF)-based ranging technique is presented which minimizes the errors resulting from low cost clock drifts, low resolution, and phase offsets using a Symmetrical Double Sided Two Way Ranging (SDS-TWR) in Burst mode. Mathematical analysis showed that in burst mode, ranging accuracy significantly improves with the number of SDS-TWR transactions successively. Additionally, simulations results show that an error of less than 1m could be achieved without increasing the frequency of sampling clock and without using costly low drift clocks.