Timing Acquisition for Distributed Antenna Systems by Exploiting the Advantages of Cooperation over Flat-Fading Channels

In the flat Rayleigh channels, two remote antennas are assumed at the base station for receiving the signal transmitted from the mobile station with a single antenna. By utilizing the coverage range of each remote antenna, a constraint is exploited to associate the timedelays from the mobile station to the two remote antennas. With this constraint, a maximum likelihood-based cooperative timing acquisition method is proposed to improve the probability of correct acquisition for each remote antenna. Moreover, a lower bound of the probability of correct acquisition is derived to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. By the analysis and simulations, it is shown that the probability of correct acquisition for each remote antenna can be improved by the cooperation between the two remote antennas.