High-Efficient Ranging Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Network

Obtaining precise internode range information with high-efficiency is essential for the Internet of Things. Two-way ranging (TWR) algorithm and its variants are widely used for measuring time-of-flight (ToF) among wireless transceivers. However, these algorithms are inefficient for large-scale networks, due to high resource consumption and long latency. In this paper, for active nodes and passive nodes, we propose the network-based TWR (NB-TWR) and the network-based passive ranging (NB-PR) algorithms, respectively, which realize all internode ToFs measuring with the minimum frames. Through theoretical analysis, we show that the ranging errors of the proposed methods are much lower than those of traditional algorithms. Our results can serve as guidelines for wireless networks to realize network ranging with high precision and limited resource consumption.