First International Workshop on C-RAN

Research Article

A Time Synchronization Mechanism Based on Software Defined Radio of General-Purpose Processor

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BibTeX Plain Text
  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/ChinaCom.2012.6417588,
    author={Hongliang Duan and Dengshan Huang and Yi Huang and Yiqing Zhou and Jinglin Shi},
    title={A Time Synchronization Mechanism Based on Software Defined Radio of General-Purpose Processor},
    proceedings={First International Workshop on C-RAN},
    publisher={IEEE},
    proceedings_a={C-RAN},
    year={2013},
    month={2},
    keywords={sdr; gpp; tdma; software time synchronization; round-trip delay algorithm},
    doi={10.1109/ChinaCom.2012.6417588}
}
  • Hongliang Duan
    Dengshan Huang
    Yi Huang
    Yiqing Zhou
    Jinglin Shi
    Year: 2013
    A Time Synchronization Mechanism Based on Software Defined Radio of General-Purpose Processor
    C-RAN
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/ChinaCom.2012.6417588
Hongliang Duan1,*, Dengshan Huang2, Yi Huang3, Yiqing Zhou3, Jinglin Shi4
  • 1: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences&Northwestern Polytechnical University
  • 2: Northwestern Polytechnical University
  • 3: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • 4: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences&Beijing Sylincom Technologies Co., Ltd
*Contact email: duanhongliang@ict.ac.cn

Abstract

In recent years, Software Defined Radio (SDR) has become one of the major research concerns in mobile communications for the advantages of flexibility and versatility. The latest SDR platforms utilize the power of general-purpose processor (GPP) to perform all of the real-time computations and several wideband communication systems are prototyped. Nevertheless, the lack of universal real-time timing control and synchronization process make implemented GPP-based SDR platforms difficult to simulate time crucial multi-user cellular communication scenarios. Focus on the problem of time synchronization on SDR platforms, this paper presents a software-based time synchronization mechanism, which is called software time synchronization (STS). On that basis, a real-time and high precision clock source is designed on GPP-based SDR platforms and the multi-user communication system is synchronized utilizing round-trip delay (RTD) algorithm. Long-term experiments showed that a SDR prototype using STS is able to simulate TDMA-based cellular communications. The results also indicate that the STS synchronization errors are within several microseconds.

Keywords
sdr; gpp; tdma; software time synchronization; round-trip delay algorithm
Published
2013-02-28
Publisher
IEEE
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ChinaCom.2012.6417588
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