A method for time and frequency synchronization in a cooperative communication system

In this paper, we present a method for time and frequency synchronization in relay based cooperative communication system. The system consists of Source, Destination and two Relay nodes. A generic frame structure is devised to meet the space-time relaying mechanism when a particular node receives plurality of signals from multiple transmitters via different wireless links. We proposed timing synchronization dealing with multiple timing offsets and frequency synchronization scheme that is unaffected by the CFO due to relays. We evaluated the probability of correct timing detection and mean of frequency error at different signal to noise ratios under ideal and realistic channel conditions.