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

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Abstract

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 the performance. Experiments show that the proposed mechanism is effective to enable time synchronization for wideband wireless communication systems on GPP-based SDR platforms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Yi Huang (Member, IEEE), Hong-Liang Duan, Yi-Qing Zhou (Senior Member, IEEE), Man-Li Qian & Liang Huang

  2. School of Instrumentation Science and Opto-Electronics Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Chao Tang

  3. Beijing Science and Technology Information Center, Beijing, 100035, China

    Chao Tang

  4. Department of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710000, China

    Hong-Liang Duan

Authors
  1. Yi Huang
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  2. Chao Tang
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  3. Hong-Liang Duan
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  4. Yi-Qing Zhou
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  5. Man-Li Qian
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  6. Liang Huang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hong-Liang Duan.

Additional information

Supported by the Major Project of Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 4110001.

The preliminary version of the paper was published in the Proceedings of CHINACOM 2012.

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Huang, Y., Tang, C., Duan, HL. et al. Efficient Time Synchronization Approach for Wireless Communication Systems on GPP-Based Software-Defined Radio Platform. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 28, 429–436 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-013-1344-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-013-1344-2

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