A distributed consensus approach to synchronization of RF signals

We propose a consensus-based algorithm for the synchronization of carrier signals in a wireless network. This work is motivated by recent progress on distributed beamforming and other cooperative MIMO techniques that require synchronized RF signals among all the cooperating nodes in a network and is aimed at addressing the limitations of the centralized master-slave approach used in previous work in this area. Our proposed algorithm is based on a variation of the classic Kuramoto model for the synchronization of coupled oscillators and is well-suited for a digital baseband implementation. We describe our proposed algorithm in detail and present initial results that show that this algorithm achieves global frequency lock given only that the network is connected i.e. there exists (possibly multi-hop) paths for every node to transmit and receive a signal from every other node.