Time-Slotted Round-Trip Carrier Synchronization in Large-Scale Wireless Networks

Carrier synchronization has been considered to be a big challenge to achieve distributed beamforming in wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of synchronizing the carriers of N distributed transmitters with a distant base station receiver. Under the duplexing constraints of the wireless channel, we present a time-slotted round-trip carrier synchronization technique required for large-scale wireless networks in a master-slave architecture. The performance analysis presented in terms of average received power at BS demonstrates the robustness of the beamforming gains against synchronization errors. Our simulation results validate the analysis and indicate that the potential beamforming gains outweigh the synchronization overhead in implementation of the protocol.