Distributed TDoA Estimation for Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Frequency-Hopping in Multipath Environment

A novel distributed TDoA (Time-Difference-of-Arrival) estimation method for wireless sensor networks (WSN) in multipath environment is proposed in this paper. For the conventional narrow band system usually adopted in the wireless sensors, the frequency-hopping technique can be utilized to perform the estimation of the wide band frequency-domain channel response, by which the super-resolution TDoA estimation is conducted independently at each sensor to detect range difference from the sensor to the two anchors. The proposed method only relies on the conventional narrow band radio transceiver and each sensor conducts range estimation independently without any information exchange or time synchronization requirement, which is a distributed range estimation method more suitable for WSN.