MS-Assisted Receiver-Receiver Time Synchronization Strategy for Femtocells

Time synchronization is an important challenge for femtocell design. An inaccurate clock can introduce interference, degrade spectrum accuracy and disrupt handovers. Among the potential solutions, wireless network-based time synchronization turns out to be cost effective because no extra provisions are required to ensure synchronization even on a regular basis. In wireless networks, receiver-receiver synchronization schemes offer very good performance. In this paper, we design an MS-assisted receiver-receiver synchronization strategy for femtocells. Two schemes are proposed for different scenarios to ensure a more comprehensive availability. Analysis and simulation results demonstrate that our proposed schemes provide sufficient synchronization accuracy for practical scenarios.