Temporal wireless synchronization with compressed opportunistic signals

In this paper we introduce a wireless temporal synchronization scheme based on wideband signals of opportunity (SOO) such as DVB-T or LTE signals. Since these signals may not be decodable we show that it is necessary that one (reference) node broadcasts an excerpt of the SOO to all other nodes to provide a reference. However, the transmission of this reference signals requires a high bandwidth. Therefore, we propose to replace this transmission with a lower-bandwidth “compressed” version of this reference signal, using ideas from the field of compressed sensing (CS). We show that the high time resolution of the original wideband SOO can be maintained so that accurate temporal synchronization is possible. On the other hand, the compression leads to higher sidelobes in the correlation function which reduces the effective SNR. Therefore, the compression rate allows to control the trade-off between the required bandwidth and the SNR.