An UWB-based communication protocol design for an infrastructure-free cooperative navigation

In this paper, we design a practical medium access control (MAC) protocol for an infrastructure-free cooperative navigation method for a group of firefighters which utilizes an ultra-wideband (UWB) technology for inter-agent ranging and communication. Specifically, our focus in this paper is on developing a communication protocol for the DWM1000 UWB transceiver that works in a robust and energy-efficient manner for our cooperative navigation system. Our proposed solution is a dynamic time division multiple access (DTDMA) in conjunction with a novel negotiation-based rescheduling method. The negotiation-based rescheduling method is designed based on the characteristic features of our cooperative navigation algorithm of interest. We demonstrate our result using a field test and a complexity analysis.