Effects of carrier synchronization on link throughput of distributed beamforming

Distributed beamforming has the great potential of performance improvement in wireless networks while the carrier synchronization overhead will reduce its performance gain. In this paper the effects of carrier synchronization on link throughput of distributed beamforming is studied. The expressions of the frequency and initial phase used by each cooperative node are derived for the existing round-trip carrier synchronization scheme under a multi-node scenario. How the time consumption for synchronization and the number of cooperative nodes impact on the precision of synchronization in terms of normalized initial received SNR at the destination is investigated. The link throughput is maximized by the optimization of constellation size, time consumption for synchronization and number of cooperative nodes. The numerical results show that the link throughput can be improved significantly by the optimizations.