Joint Localization and Time Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks with Anchor Uncertainties

Although localization and synchronization share many aspects in common, they are traditionally treated separately. In this paper, we present a unified framework to jointly solve these two problems at the same time. The joint approach is attractive because it can solve both localization and synchronization using the same set of message exchanges. This is extremely important for energy saving, especially for the energy constrained wireless sensor networks. Furthermore, since the accuracy of localization and synchronization is very sensitive to the accuracy of anchor locations and timings, the joint localization and synchronization problem with inaccurate anchor is considered in this paper. A novel generalized total least squares (GTLS) based method is proposed and the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the joint localization and time synchronization is derived. Simulation results show that the mean square error performances of the proposed estimator can attain the CRLB.