Time synchronization is an important challenge for femtocell design. An inaccurate clock can introduce interference, degrade spectrum accuracy and disrupt handovers. Among the potential solutions, wireless network-based time synchronization turns out to be cost effective because no extra provisions are required to ensure synchronization even on a regular basis. In wireless networks, receiver-receiver synchronization schemes offer very good performance. In this paper, we design an MS-assisted receiver-receiver synchronization strategy for femtocells. Two schemes are proposed for different scenarios to ensure a more comprehensive availability. Analysis and simulation results demonstrate that our proposed schemes provide sufficient synchronization accuracy for practical scenarios.
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