Network Synchronization for Two-Way Multi-Hop Relay Networks with Block Modulation

This paper proposes novel time-efficient network synchronization schemes for TDD/TDMA based two-way multi-hop relay networks with block modulation. One of the proposed schemes is based on broadcast (BC) timing synchronization. Since this scheme causes network synchronization errors at each receiver, additional guard interval (GI) to compensate the error is introduced. The second proposed scheme is based on both of BC and multiple access (MA) timing synchronization. The additional GI is not required and the time-efficiency is improved because the transmit and receive timing at each node are adjusted to eliminate the network synchronization errors. The second proposed scheme achieves over 98.8% time-efficiency with arbitrary node arrangement, bandwidth, and number of hops when the number of symbols per frame is hundred.