Efficient Time Synchronization Approach for Wireless Communication Systems on GPP-Based Software-Defined Radio Platform

• Published in: Journal of computer science and technology Vol. 28; no. 3; pp. 429 - 436
• Main Author: 黄伊 唐超 段红亮 周一青 钱曼藜 黄亮
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01.05.2013; Springer Nature B.V; Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China%School of Instrumentation Science and Opto-Electronics Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China; Department of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710000, China; Beijing Science and Technology Information Center, Beijing 100035, China%Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
• Subjects: Algorithms; Analysis; Artificial Intelligence; Communications systems; Computer Science; Construction; Data Structures and Information Theory; Digital signal processors; Global positioning systems; GPP; GPS; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Microsoft; Performance evaluation; Platforms; Radio; Radio communications; Regular Paper; Science; Signal processing; Software; Software Engineering; Studies; TDMA系统; Theory of Computation; Time Division Multiple Access; Time measurements; Time synchronization; Wideband; Wireless communication systems; Wireless communications; Wireless networks; 同步方法; 宽带无线通信系统; 时间同步; 软件定义无线电; 软件无线电平台; software-defined radio; time synchronization; time division multiple access; round-trip delay algorithm
• ISSN: 1000-9000; 1860-4749
• DOI: 10.1007/s11390-013-1344-2

General purpose processer （GPP） based software-defined radio （SDR） platforms provide wireless communication system engineers with maximal architecture flexibility and versatility to construct a wideband wireless communication system. Nevertheless, the lack of hardware real-time timing control makes it difficult to achieve time synchronization between the base station and the terminals. In this paper, a software-based time synchronization （STS） method is proposed to realize the time synchronization of time division multiple access （TDMA） based wireless communication systems. A high precision software clock source is firstly constructed to measure the elapse of processing time. The Round-Trip Delay （RTD） algorithm is then presented to calculate timing advance values and achieve time synchronization. An example TDMA system is implemented on Microsoft Sora platforms to evaluate is effective to enable time synchronization for wideband the performance. Experiments show that the proposed mechanism wireless communication systems on GPP-based SDR platforms.