High-Precision Wireless Synchronization: When Wi-Fi Meets UWB

Seamless and reliable communication is crucial across personal and industrial domains in today’s intercon- nected world, ranging from multimedia streaming and aug- mented/virtual reality to smart manufacturing. This need ex- tends to wireless communication, which supports mobile appli- cations and offers greater flexibility. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) addresses stringent real-time demands with low latency, low jitter, and high availability, relying on precise time synchro- nization via the Precision Time Protocol (PTP). While PTP is widely adopted in wired networks, its usage in wireless networks is less common. This paper investigates the potential of Ultra- Wide Band (UWB) technology to achieve high-precision clock synchronization in Wireless-TSN (W-TSN). Traditionally used for indoor localization owing to its high-precision timestamping, UWB offers reliability and resilience against multipath fading. This research integrates UWB into Openwifi, an open-source Software Defined Radio (SDR) Wi-Fi chip design augmented with TSN capabilities, serving as the W-TSN solution. Signifi- cant improvements in synchronization accuracy were achieved by increasing the timestamping resolution and refining the clock drift correction algorithm within the Openwifi FPGA. This resulted in a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 13.1 ns and a 90th percentile (P90) clock error of 25.0 ns. The integration of UWB technology further improved clock synchronization accuracy by roughly 25%, achieving an MAE of 9.98 ns with a P90 error of 20.0 ns. Finally, the study highlights UWB-based synchronization’s potential applications and benefits, including inherent localization capabilities, while noting limitations such as range constraints and added complexity. Wireless Time-Sensitive Networking (W-TSN) · Precision Time Protocl (PTP) · Clock Synchronization · Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) · Openwifi