Patent ID: 7876266

Claim:
A method of solving for unknown location values and clock rate values of one or more nodes of a network of nodes communicating with one another, comprising: associating multiple nodes including multiple transmitting nodes and multiple receiving nodes that operate with, respectively, a priori asynchronous node transmit clocks and node receive clocks, the transmitting nodes producing ping transmit events and the receiving nodes producing ping receive events by receiving and associating receive count stamps to the ping transmit events; for each transmitting node of the multiple nodes, the ping transmit events taking place at transmission times corresponding to a transmit clock count produced in response to operation of the node transmit clock, and, for each receiving node of the multiple nodes, the ping receive events taking place at receive times corresponding to a receive clock count produced in response to operation of the node receive clock; generating ping event values corresponding to ping events relating to associated ones of the ping transmit events and the ping receive events; accumulating the ping event values produced by the multiple nodes; grouping the accumulated ping event values corresponding to multiple ones of the ping events that include ping events associated with multiple different pairs of nodes of the network and that occur within a harmonic block time interval; and generating from the grouped, accumulated ping event values solutions for transmit and receive node clock rate values and node location values relating to the transmit and receive events at arbitrary times within the harmonic block time interval, the solutions for node clock rate and node location values of one of the associated multiple nodes being a function of the ping transmit events and ping receive events produced by the others of the associated multiple nodes.