A synchronizing scheme for an impulse network

We define a synchronous impulse network (SIN) to be a network of distributed wireless nodes employing UWB impulse transceivers whose local oscillators are ´ticking´ at the same time/phase. In this paper, a synchronizing scheme employing time-of-arrival (ToA) measurements to transfer time among nodes in order to build a SIN is proposed. Three major sources of impairments to the measurement of the ToA are considered. They are additive noise, multipath self-interference and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) measurements. The effect of multipath self-interference on a correlative timing detector, which is an important component of the proposed synchronization system, has been addressed (Chui et al. (2003)). This paper is devoted to the proposed master-slave time division multiple access (TDMA) synchronization scheme and analyzes the accumulated timing jitter as a result of additive noise, oscillator phase noise and multipath propagation, and places a bound on the number of synchronous nodes possible in the network. We conclude this paper by introducing the concept of a ´roving´ master which transforms the master-slave TDMA scheme to a mutual synchronous network. The other objectives of the ´roving´ master are to extend the geographical coverage of the synchronous network and overcome blockages of signal propagation paths.