The number of wireless communication devices is inexorably increasing to form massive connected networks within the paradigm of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT devices must have low power consumption and communicate with low latency and low data-rate while enabling self-organizing features during deployment and network operation. These requirements translate to research challenges on the communication protocols, network organization and connectivity. Fundamental aspects for those challenges are time synchronization and geolocation of the devices.

Although synchronization and localization are strongly linked by a packets time-of-flight measured in local time, they are mostly treated independently. Neglecting this connection increases the energy consumption of the nodes and requires additional channel resources for communication. Moreover, in the vision of IoT as vast amount of connected objects, tasks have to be solved in a decentralized way, making the network robust and scaleable. Our research focuses on the unification of the synchronization and localization problem for decentralized networks.