Burst Mode Two-Way Ranging with Cramer-Rao Bound Noise Performance

This paper addresses estimating the distance between wireless nodes using a two-way ranging technique that approaches the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRB) on ranging accuracy in a white noise environment. Standard two-way ranging methods do not achieve this bound because sampling artifacts limit resolution through range binning, so multiple measurements are combined to improve performance. Code modulus synchronization is presented as an alternative that approaches the CRB. The analytical results presented in this article are confirmed by implementing the technique on a prototype wireless system and measuring the performance in the presence of noise.