I think you would have to further explain what you mean by "linked together by a common clock". Also, what sort of distances are you talking about? 1 meter, 2 km?
In general you can not resolve distance with a one way phase measurement. You can step the frequency of the carrier, and impart different different phases and calculate distance using the group delay equation T=Δphase/Δf. The old HP link analyzers did the same measurement with modultion sidebands.
If you do in fact have a clock somehow shared between the two, you could measure phase, but would have to take out the phase shift of the clock phase moving with distance (the clock has to propagate to the receiver too, and if that distance changes, then its phase is a moving target too).
On top of this all, you have to use a frequency low enough to not form phase ambiguities, or to resolve them with an alogrithm.
Rich