Preamble Detection Method for RSS Data Synchronization in WLAN Monitoring

Abstract

Received signal strength (RSS) data is one of the useful data types for understanding wireless link quality. To perform WLAN monitoring over a wide area of the target environment, it is necessary to use multiple sensor nodes to observe RSS data at various positions. In this situation, achieving synchronization among sensor nodes is challenging. In this paper, we propose a synchronization method for different sets of RSS data. In our method, by analyzing In-phase and Quadrature (IQ) samples, the preamble, which is part of a wireless frame, is detected, and the reception start timing of each preamble is used as a synchronization timing point. Through experiments in an actual indoor environment, we confirmed that our method can achieve the synchronization accuracy of less than 1 µs between different sets of RSS data.