Abstract
Recently, cooperative multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have attracted increasing attention for their feasibility and flexibility over MIMO systems. Meanwhile, combining cooperative MIMO systems with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been recognized as a promising technology to support next-generation wireless communication systems. In cooperative MIMO systems, however, the signals transmitted by cooperating nodes may arrive at the receiver on distinct timing and be affected by multiple carrier frequency offsets (CFOs). As a result, synchronization is a challenging and important task in cooperative MIMO systems. In this thesis, we propose a synchronization scheme based on partial Zadoff-Chu sequences for cooperative MIMO systems. In the proposed preamble design, partial Zadoff-Chu sequences are placed on disjoint sets of subcarriers in an interleaved manner. Such an arrangement not only guarantees frequency-domain training signal separation, but also produces separable time-domain training signals to cope with the multiple CFOs. Accordingly, both time and frequency synchronization can be done in the time domain, while they are achieved in the time and frequency domains, respectively, in most existing synchronization schemes for cooperative MIMO systems. Furthermore, the proposed training sequences enjoy good auto-correlation and cross-correlation properties, which leads to superior synchronization performance as compared with existing synchronization schemes.