Efficient Time Synchronization Approach for Wireless Communication Systems on GPP-Based Software-Defined Radio Platform

General purpose processer (GPP) based software-defined radio (SDR) platforms provide wireless communication system engineers with maximal architecture flexibility and versatility to construct a wideband wireless communication system. Nevertheless, the lack of hardware real-time timing control makes it difficult to achieve time synchronization between the base station and the terminals. In this paper, a software-based time synchronization (STS) method is proposed to realize the time synchronization of time division multiple access (TDMA) based wireless communication systems. A high precision software clock source is firstly constructed to measure the elapse of processing time. The Round-Trip Delay (RTD) algorithm is then presented to calculate timing advance values and achieve time synchronization. An example TDMA system is implemented on Microsoft Sora platforms to evaluate the performance. Experiments show that the proposed mechanism is effective to enable time synchronization for wideband wireless communication systems on GPP-based SDR platforms.