A novel receiver-receiver time synchronization scheme for femtocells

Time synchronization is an important challenge for femtocells. The inaccurate clock of femtocells can introduce interference and affect spectrum accuracy. Among the potential methods to solve this problem, wireless network based time synchronization schemes are economical and available in most situations. In wireless networks, receiver-receiver synchronization schemes like RBS offer a very good performance. However, the requirement of one super node and a large number of broadcasts for RBS make it unrealistic to use in some scenarios like a macro/femto scenario. In this paper, a new receiver-receiver synchronization scheme is proposed. It is suitable for macro/femto scenarios and other decentralized networks. Analysis and simulation results demonstrate that, while the number of broadcasts in the network is greatly reduced, our proposed scheme has a similar performance in term of synchronization error when compared with RBS.