Sensitivity of coherent cooperative transmission to synchronization errors

Coherent cooperative transmission is a potential technical approach to overcome the constraints imposed by the limited battery power encountered in many distributed networks such as sensor and UAVs. In coherent cooperative transmission, two, or more, spatially separated communications nodes act as elements of an antenna array to transmit common data to a destination. However, a key challenge in such distributed systems is achieving synchronization among cooperative nodes. This paper analyzes and evaluates performance of coherent cooperative transmission in the presence of frequency, phase and time synchronization errors when maximal ratio, equal gain and and selection diversity transmission schemes are used by the cooperative nodes.