Timing and Carrier Synchronization in Wireless Communication Systems: A Survey and Classification of Research in the Last Five Years

Timing and carrier synchronization is a fundamental requirement for any wireless communication system to work properly. Timing synchronization is the process by which a receiver node determines the correct instants of time at which to sample the incoming signal. Carrier synchronization is the process by which a receiver adapts the frequency and phase of its local carrier oscillator with those of the received signal. In this paper, we survey the literature over the last five years (2010-2014) and present a comprehensive literature review and classification of the recent research progress in achieving timing and carrier synchronization in single-input-single-output (SISO), multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO), cooperative relaying, and multiuser/multicell interference networks. Considering both single-carrier and multi-carrier communication systems, we survey and categorise the timing and carrier synchronization techniques proposed for the different communication systems focusing on the system model assumptions for synchronization, the synchronization challenges, and the state-of-the-art synchronization solutions and their limitations. Finally, we envision some future research directions.Comment: submitted for journal publicatio

A Synchronization Design for UWB-Based Wireless Multimedia Systems

Multi-band orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) ultra-wideband (UWB) technology offers large throughput, low latency and has been adopted in wireless audio/video (AV) network products. The complexity and power comsumption, however, are still major hurdles for the technology to be widely adopted. In this paper, we propose a unified synchronizer design targeted for MB-OFDM transceiver that achieves high performance with low implementation complexity. The key component of the proposed synchronizer is a parallel auto-correlator structure in which multiple ACF units are instantiated and their outputs are shared by functional blocks in the synchronizer, including preamble signal detection, time-frequency code identification, symbol timing, carrier frequency offset estimation and frame synchronization. This common structure not only reduces the hardware cost but also minimizes the number of operations in the functional blocks in the synchronizer as the results of a large portion of computation can be shared among different functional blocks. To mitigate the effect of narrowband interference (NBI) on UWB systems, we also propose a low-complexity ACF-based frequency detector to facilitate the design of (adaptive) notch filter in analog/digital domain. The theoretical analysis and simulation show that the performance of the proposed design is close to optimal, while complexity is significantly reduced compared to existing work