The use of symmetric multi-way two phase ranging to compensate time drift in wireless sensor network

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of crystal clock drift on the ranging accuracy. A novel technique in which a group of sensor devices, each having a different clock drift, can reduce this adverse effect by a 2-phase round robin fashion is presented. In comparison to the conventional way of point-to-point group ranging scheme, this technique has the desirable advantage of low energy consumption, which is a very important requirement in wireless sensor networks. The ability to reduce the effect of timing drift is illustrated in the simulation results where our proposed method outperforms prior works under the effect of clock drift on the ranging accuracy.