An efficient closed-form solution for joint synchronization and localization using TOA

This paper considers the joint node synchronization and localization problem, a key enabling aspect for wireless sensor networks. A new algorithm that can jointly estimate the clock bias and the position of an unknown sensor node is developed. The newly proposed method only involves the applications of closed-form weighted least squares (WLS) technique and therefore has lower computational complexity than conventional maximum likelihood (ML) estimators. More importantly, through theoretical performance analysis, the new algorithm is shown to be able to achieve the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) accuracy under the condition of high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), a prominent advantage over other existing closed-form methods. Simulations demonstrate the good performance of the developed algorithm. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.