Exploiting Signals-of-Opportunity for the Synchronization of Moving Sensors

Abstract

Positioning and communication systems rely on synchronization processes that are expensive in terms of time, energy and resources. A novel localization algorithm has been recently developed for the synchronization of static sensors [1]. This algorithm exploits time-delay measurements of signals-of-opportunity of static sources at unknown locations, which are not necessarily the tracked sources. We propose major enhancements of the initial method [1], enabling more realistic scenarios, with moving sources and sensors, in the presence of clock drift. Instead of relying on time-delay measurements only, the proposed method relies also on Doppler-shift measurements. Experiments show that the performance of the proposed method meets the Cramer-Rao bound.