High-Precision Wireless Synchronization: When Wi-Fi meets UWB

Seamless and reliable communication is crucial across personal and industrial domains in today’s interconnected world, ranging from multimedia streaming and augmented/virtual reality to smart manufacturing. This need extends to wireless communication, which supports mobile applications and offers greater flexibility. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) addresses stringent real-time demands with low latency, low jitter, and high availability, relying on precise time synchronization via the Precision Time Protocol (PTP). While PTP is widely adopted in wired networks, its usage in wireless networks is less common. This paper investigates the potential of Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology to achieve high-precision clock synchronization in Wireless-TSN (W-TSN). Traditionally used for indoor localization owing to its high-precision timestamping, UWB offers reliability and resilience against multipath fading. This research integrates UWB into Openwifi, an open-source Software Defined Radio (SDR) Wi-Fi chip design augmented with TSN capabilities, serving as the W-TSN solution. Significant improvements in synchronization accuracy were achieved by increasing the timestamping resolution and refining the clock drift correction algorithm within the Openwifi FPGA. This resulted in a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 13.1 ns and a 90th percentile (P90) clock error of 25.0 ns. The integration of UWB technology further improved clock synchronization accuracy by roughly 25%, achieving an MAE of 9.98 ns with a P90 error of 20.0 ns. Finally, the study highlights UWB-based synchronization’s potential applications and benefits, including inherent localization capabilities, while noting limitations such as range constraints and added complexity.