Blind Timing and Carrier Synchronisation in Distributed Multiple Input Multiple Output Communication Systems

This paper addresses the problem of joint blind timing and carrier synchronisation in a (distributed-M) × N antenna system where the objective is to estimate the M carrier offsets, the M timing offsets and to recover the transmitted symbols for each of the M users given only the measured signal at the N antennas of the receiver. The authors propose a modular receiver structure that exploits blind source separation to reduce the problem into more tractable sub-problems of estimating individual timing and carrier offsets for multiple users. This leads to a robust solution of low complexity. The authors investigate the performance of the estimators analytically using modified Cramer-Rao bounds and computer simulations.