Mean field message passing for cooperative simultaneous ranging and synchronization

Many emerging technologies for wireless networks (WNs) require decentralized synchronization and ranging, i.e., distance estimation between neighboring pairs of nodes. Both tasks are related to each other when they are based on time measurements between nodes. Revealing this connection, we present a mean field (MF) message passing algorithm for cooperative simultaneous ranging and synchronization (CoSRAS), which jointly estimates the internode distances and clock parameters in a fully distributed way. It is shown that the use of the MF method reduces the computation and communication efforts compared to other message passing methods. For MF message exchange between nodes, only broadcast communication is required. Our simulation results demonstrate the equivalence in performance with centralized state-of-the-art joint ranging and synchronization algorithms.