BeamSync: Over-The-Air Carrier Synchronization in Distributed RadioWeaves

Abstract: In a distributed multi-antenna system, multiple geographically separated transmit nodes communicate simultaneously to a receive node. Synchronization of these nodes is essential to achieve a good performance at the receiver. RadioWeaves is a new paradigm of cell-free massive MIMO array deployment using distributed multi-antenna panels in indoor environments. In this paper, we study the carrier frequency synchronization problem in distributed RadioWeave panels. We propose a novel, over-the-air synchronization protocol, which we call as BeamSync, to synchronize all the different multi-antenna transmit panels. We also show that beamforming the synchronization signal in the dominant direction of the channel between the panels is optimal and the synchronization performance is significantly better than traditional beamforming techniques.