EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS OF SOFTWARE ALGORITHMIC SYNCHRONIZATION OF DISTRIBUTED RADIO SYSTEM WITH MOBILE CARRIERS

Abstract

Introduction. One of the classes of modern radio engineering systems are systems with spatial diversity of transmitting, receiving or transceiving elements. In such systems, an increase of the information content is achieved by signal coprocessing ensuring synchronization in time and phase of the carrier oscillation. Currently, the researchers do not pay enough attention to the requirements for the accuracy of synchronization of distributed systems of different applications, as well as simple and affordable ways to synchronize them.Objective. The paper main objective is the search for technical solutions for clock and phase synchronization without atomic frequency standards and external sources of coordinate-time information.Methods and materials. The paper considers a distributed radio engineering system with non-rigid structure. Each element of the system has reference signal from its own crystal oscillator. The oscillators are not physically aligned. The phases of their oscillations are periodically compared by the method of two-way transmission of synchronizing signals (from one element to another and vice versa). The synchronization technique (software algorithmic approach) is reduced to the coprocessing signal correction according to estimated frequency (phase) drifts. The testing of the proposed technical solution is presented on a hardware model consisting of ten receiving and transmitting modules.Results. The experiment showed that RMS of synchronization errors does not exceeded 12 degrees by phase (for VHF), or 0.2 ns by time. These results are acquired for spatial diversity up to several hundred meters, mutual speed of the modules up to several meters per second and may be extended for higher frequencies (in particular, UHF).Conclusion. The paper proposes a method of multilateral propagation to synchronize distributed radioengineering systems. Combined with software algorithmic technique this method enables to obtain synchronization accuracy in real-time sufficient for coherent diversity technique.