Multiple timing offsets compensation in cooperative communication systems

Cooperative communication systems have attracted much attention recently due to their desirable performance gain while using single antenna terminals. However, most of the existing works on cooperative communications require perfect timing synchronization among users, which is usually not true in practical systems. In this paper, a general framework of the re-synchronization filter design is developed in order to compensate the multiple timing offsets at the destination. The proposed method is applied to different scenarios with varying degrees of timing misalignment and is numerically shown to provide excellent performances that approach the perfectly synchronized case.