Abstract—A novel simple joint clock synchronization and localization algorithm based on Pairwise Broadcast Synchronization (PBS) protocol in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, anchor nodes (with unknown clock bias and known position) overhear the timing message exchanges of reference node (with known clock bias and known position) and unknown node (with unknown clock bias and unknown position) without sending extra messages. Comparing this proposed algorithm with those algorithms based on two-way message exchanges mechanism, we find that this new algorithm can reduce a lot of communication overhead and requires less reference nodes. The simulation results indicate that this algorithm can ensure high accuracy and its estimation performance meets the Cramer-Rao Lower Bounds (CRLB) simultaneously. Considering the tradeoff between the estimation performance and communication overhead, we can see that the proposed algorithm performs better than the available joint clock synchronization and localization algorithms.

Index Terms—Wireless sensor networks, clock synchronization, localization, communication overhead, energy-efficient

Cite: Yong-Dong Lai, Ji-Ming Lin, Jin Ding, and Xiang Zhao, “A Simple Joint Clock Synchronization and Localization Algorithm with Low Communication Overhead," Journal of Communications, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 77-83, 2016. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.11.1.77-83