Towards a unified view on space and time in sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, many applications rely on the ability of sensor nodes to estimate their physical location and time with respect to a common reference scale. This necessity is reflected by the development of a significant number of algorithms for localization and time synchronization for sensor networks in the recent past. However, research on location estimation on the one hand and on time synchronization on the other hand has been largely separated. Despite this, models, requirements, techniques, and algorithms of the two domains are rather similar and in some respects closely related. The purpose of this paper is to make this affinity explicit, with the hope of stimulating a mutual fertilization and enabling a better understanding of both domains.