Ranging without time stamps exchanging

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for estimating the distance between two wireless nodes without exchanging time stamps, accounting for oscillator clock imperfections, and demonstrates promising numerical results.

Contribution

It proposes a novel ranging model incorporating uniform and Gaussian errors and develops a simple, effective estimator based on the method of moments.

Findings

The proposed estimator performs well in simulations.

The model effectively captures practical oscillator clock errors.

Numerical results validate the estimator's promising performance.

Abstract

We investigate the range estimate between two wireless nodes without time stamps exchanging. Considering practical aspects of oscillator clocks, we propose a new model for ranging in which the measurement errors include the sum of two distributions, namely, uniform and Gaussian. We then derive an approximate maximum likelihood estimator (AMLE), which poses a difficult global optimization problem. To avoid the difficulty in solving the complex AMLE, we propose a simple estimator based on the method of moments. Numerical results show a promising performance for the proposed technique.