Experimental Demonstration of Nanosecond Accuracy Wireless Network Synchronization

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an experimental wireless network synchronization scheme achieving better than 5 nanoseconds accuracy using commercially available hardware and a scalable protocol suitable for large sensor networks.

Contribution

It introduces the first experimental implementation of nanosecond-precision wireless synchronization using software-defined ultra wideband transceivers.

Findings

Achieved <5ns rms synchronization accuracy in a 4-node network.

Used commercially available hardware and a scalable blink protocol.

Validated the approach through experimental demonstration.

Abstract

Accurate wireless timing synchronization has been an extremely important topic in wireless sensor networks, required in applications ranging from distributed beam forming to precision localization and navigation. However, it is very challenging to realize, in particular when the required accuracy should be better than the runtime between the nodes. This work presents, to our knowledge for the first time, an experimental timing synchronization scheme that achieves a timing accuracy better than 5ns rms in a network with 4 nodes. The experimental hardware is built from commercially available components and based on software defined ultra wideband transceivers. The protocol for establishing the synchronization is based on our recently developed blink protocol that can scale from the small network demonstrated here to larger networks of hundreds or thousands of nodes.