Title: A naive time of flight ranging scheme for wireless sensor networks

Authors: Asif Iqbal Baba; Fan Wu; Tanvir Ahmed

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, AL, USA ' Department of Computer Science, Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, AL, USA ' Department of Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

Abstract: Recently wireless sensor network (WSN) applications have been in high demand. The key aspects of these applications is 'localisation'. Due to low energy and limited processing capability, many sensor nodes do not have any knowledge about their location, thus requires a method to get localised within a network. Nodes can be localised based on the measurements estimated using different techniques. In this paper, a naive time of flight (ToF) ranging measurement scheme is presented which minimises the error coming from low resolution clocks of the deployed nodes and removes the effect of clock drift on ranging measurements. The proposed scheme uses inter-arrival time of multiple ranging requests on the receiver side and uses solely the receiver node's clock to calculate the time of flight. The accuracy achieved with the proposed method is better than other existing approaches. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieved the accuracy within 1m.

Keywords: wireless sensor network; WSN; time of flight; ToF; ranging inaccuracy; clock resolution; localisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2020.110522

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2020 Vol.25 No.4, pp.347 - 365

Received: 12 Feb 2019
Accepted: 26 Aug 2019
Published online: 22 Oct 2020 *

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