Directional timing synchronization in wideband millimeter wave cellular systems with low-resolution ADCs

Abstract

We develop a new beamforming strategy for millimeter-wave systems to improve the frame timing synchronization performance under low-resolution analog-to-digital converters. In the proposed method, identical synchronization sequences are sent across a cluster of simultaneously probed synchronization beams. The beam codewords in the beam cluster are selected to maximize the received synchronization signal-to-quantization-plus-noise ratio (SQNR). Numerical results reveal that the frame timing synchronization performance of the proposed method outperforms the existing approach due to the improvement in the received synchronization SQNR.