High-precision UWB-based timestamping

The work presented in this paper is related with time synchronization for wireless networks. In particular, it is focused on the proposal and experimental evaluation of a low-cost and high precision timestamping technique based on Ultra Wide Band (UWB) signalling. In recent years, the use of such systems has gained an increasing success thanks to their robustness to interferers and multipath. In this paper a new hybrid wireless node is proposed; a traditional IEEE802.15.4 radio, the reference physical layer for wireless sensor networks, is supported by an UWB transceiver. The former is used for communication purposes and allows to preserve compatibility with already installed infrastructures/networks; the latter is used for time of arrival estimation. Hardware prototypes have been realized and experimental tests have shown a sub-nanosecond accuracy. A comparison with commercial solutions has shown a performance improvement with respect to conventional approaches.