High-Performance Low-Complexity Hierarchical Frequency Synchronization for Distributed Massive MIMO-OFDMA Systems

We propose a high-performance yet low-complexity hierarchical frequency synchronization scheme for orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) aided distributed massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems, where multiple carrier frequency offsets (CFOs) have to be estimated in the uplink. To solve this multi-CFO estimation problem efficiently, we classify the active antenna units (AAUs) as the master and the slaves. Then, we split the scheme into two stages. During the first stage the distributed slave AAUs are synchronized with the master AAU, while the user equipment (UE) is synchronized with the closest slave AAU during the second stage. The mean square error (MSE) performance of our scheme is better than that of the representative state-of-the-art baseline schemes, while its computational complexity is substantially lower.