Clock Error Analysis of Common Time of Flight based Positioning Methods

TL;DR

This paper analyzes clock error impacts on Time of Flight positioning methods, highlighting the superior robustness of Double-Pulse techniques in synchronization-less radio-based localization.

Contribution

It introduces a unified notation and evaluates clock error effects, providing insights into the robustness of various ToF positioning methods without synchronization.

Findings

Double-Pulse methods show superior clock error robustness.

Clock errors significantly affect localization accuracy.

Unified notation aids comparison of ToF methods.

Abstract

Today, many applications such as production or rescue settings rely on highly accurate entity positioning. Advanced Time of Flight (ToF) based positioning methods provide highaccuracy localization of entities. A key challenge for ToF based positioning is to synchronize the clocks between the participating entities. This paper summarizes and analyzes ToA and TDoA methods with respect to clock error robustness. The focus is on synchronization-less methods, i.e. methods which reduce the infrastructure requirement significantly. We introduce a unified notation to survey and compare the relevant work from literature. Then we apply a clock error model and compute worst case location-accuracy errors. Our analysis reveals a superior error robustness against clock errors for so called Double-Pulse methods when applied to radio based ToF positioning