METHOD FOR INCREASING THE COVERAGE AREA OF A BASE STATION

摘要

A technique for increasing the range of the receiver of a time division multiple access communications system in which the receiver has to identify the timing position of the timeslots in signals received from different other transceivers of the system. Each transmitted timeslot includes at its end a predetermined buffer period in which no useful data is transmitted. The receiver analyses a selected captured portion of the received signal at each of a set of predetermined time delays or offsets relative to the start of the captured signal portion to try to identify the timing position. The maximum timing offset for the timeslot position search after the start position of that search is extended to be greater than the predetermined buffer period at the end of the timeslot thus allowing timeslots with greater delays to be received. The receiver also searches for the position of the received timeslots (B) on the assumption that the start position (9) of those timeslots will be delayed by a predetermined time period (12) relative to the start position (11) of its transmission timeslots (A).