Robust High-Performance Bi-Directional Phase Synchronization Algorithm for Distributed and Collaborative Beamforming

The distributed and collaborative beamforming (DCBF) technology has emerged as a promising enabler, which bears the potential for substantially improving both energy efficiency and communication range of low-power wireless networks, such as wireless sensor networks, millimeter-wave/terahertz communication networks, machine-to-machine communication networks, and UAV communication networks. However, since the distributed transmitters are naturally asynchronous, and both the transmitters and receivers are movable, achieving phase synchronization at the target receiver remains a critical challenge for practical implementations of DCBF. As a remedy, in this paper we propose a high-performance robust bi-directional phase synchronization algorithm for DCBF. Different from the previous works that primarily focus on optimizing adaptive phase perturbation sizes, the proposed algorithm further introduces a novel adaptive mechanism to leverage the directional information of the phase perturbation to jointly accelerate the convergence speed and improve the synchronization accuracy. Extensive simulation results are provided to validate the superior performance of the proposed phase synchronization scheme over existing state-of-the-art schemes.