Title: Cluster-based time synchronisation scheme for femtocell network

Authors: Mohammad Kamrul Hasan; Rashid Abdelhaleem Saeed; Raed Ali Alsaqour; Ahmed Fadzil Ismail; Hassan Abdalla Aisha; Shayla Islam

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), 50728, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia ' Department of Electronics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Sudan University of Science and Technology (SUST), Khartoum 11113, Sudan ' School of Computer Science, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600, Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), Kuala Lumpur 50728, Malaysia ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), Kuala Lumpur 50728, Malaysia ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), Kuala Lumpur 50728, Malaysia

Abstract: Femtocell is a recently developed technology in cellular wireless networks, which extends network coverage indoors, and is used to serve a small number of users. Synchronisation is one of the most significant technical challenges in femtocell networks and it guarantees an acceptable clock offset and frequency error (skew). Clock offset and skew lead to severe interference between femtocell base stations (fBSs) or between fBSs and macrocell base stations (mBSs). The ultimate objective of this paper is to develop cluster-based time synchronisation scheme to reduce clock offset and skew in terms of precise synchronisation in fBS neighbouring nodes. In consequence with the developed cluster-based time synchronisation scheme, the intra-cluster and inter-cluster time synchronisation is proposed. The proposed scheme is evaluated through analytical approach and benchmarked with mobile station-assisted synchronisation scheme. Results show that the proposed scheme is able to significantly reduce clock offsets to 53% and 60.32% for clock skew.

Keywords: clustering; femtocell synchronisation; femtocell networks; intra-clusters; inter-clusters; cellular wireless networks; clock offset; frequency error; skew; interference; time synchronisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMC.2015.072063

International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2015 Vol.13 No.6, pp.567 - 598

Accepted: 16 Sep 2014
Published online: 30 Sep 2015 *

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