Cooperative Timing Acquisition for Distributed Antenna Systems: A Preliminary Study

This paper investigates the cooperative timing acquisition (CTA) for distributed antenna systems (DAS). As a preliminary study, the path loss and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel are considered without assuming multipath fading and shadowing. In the DAS coverage region, two remote antennas (RA) are assumed at base station (BS) for receiving the signal transmitted from the mobile station (MS) with a single antenna. Under the constraint that is derived from the known locations of the two RAs, a maximum-likelihood (ML)-based CTA method is proposed. By the analysis and simulation, it is shown that the probability of correct acquisition for each RA can be improved by the cooperation of the two RAs.