A Novel Distributed Algorithm for Phase Synchronization in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this letter, the problem of phase synchronization for a group of drones acting as relays to build a connection between a base station (BS) and a ground receiver (GR) is investigated. The received signal strength (RSS) of the GR significantly degrades due to phase-mismatch caused by mobility of the drones. To tackle this challenge, a distributed synchronization algorithm that utilizes a few feedbacks is proposed and its convergence is proved for a specified bound on the frequency deviation. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the received signal strength (RSS) of the GR is presented assuming different deviation frequencies and number of drones. Provided simulation results demonstrate that our proposed method is capable of synchronizing the drones’ phases for all the considered deviation frequencies and number of drones. Moreover, the proposed method outperforms the existing cumulative positive one-bit feedback based approaches in terms of convergence speed and RSS, which renders the proposed algorithm viable for practical deployment.