Joint Estimation of the Time Delay and the Clock Drift and Offset Using UWB signals

TL;DR

This paper develops a method for jointly estimating delay, clock offset, and drift between two transceivers using UWB signals, including theoretical bounds and practical estimators validated by simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel protocol and estimators for joint delay and clock parameter estimation, along with theoretical analysis and validation.

Findings

Derived Cramer-Rao bounds for the estimators

Proposed joint maximum likelihood estimator

Validated theoretical results through simulations

Abstract

We consider two transceivers, the first with perfect clock and the second with imperfect clock. We investigate the joint estimation of the delay between the transceivers and the offset and the drift of the imperfect clock. We propose a protocol for the synchronization of the clocks. We derive some empirical estimators for the delay, the offset and the drift, and compute the Cramer-Rao lower bounds and the joint maximum likelihood estimator of the delay and the drift. We study the impact of the protocol parameters and the time-of-arrival estimation variance on the achieved performances. We validate some theoretical results by simulation.