Blind Synchronization for CP-OFDM Systems

Abstract

In recent years, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system has become the most widely-deployed wireless technology due to the advantages of high system capacity and efficient spectrum efficiency. Nevertheless, one of the most serious concerns of the OFDM system is the synchronization problem. For example, OFDM is very sensitive to inter-carrier interference (ICI). If the ICI can't be properly compensated, system performance will be degraded dramatically. Besides, if the receiver cannot predict the arrival time of the OFDM symbols correctly, it will result in the rising of the bit error rate (BER) of the received symbols. In the conventional pilot-based synchronization, it has to pay the price of reducing the system throughput due to the pilot insertion. In this paper, a blind synchronization method is proposed via using the inherit repetitive feature of the CP-based OFDM symbol. Results show that the proposed blind synchronization method can have the best BER performance among the compared literary blind synchronization methods.