A novel CFO estimator with joint bisection-searching and complexity-reduction technique for uplink MC-CDMA systems

This paper presents a simple scheme, which speeds the estimation of carrier frequency offset (CFO) as well as reducing the estimation complexity for multicarrier code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) uplink. Based on the concept of bisection method, the CFO is efficiently estimated by way of locating the peak value in the output power spectrum of the minimum output energy (MOE) detector. Complexity reduction results from the proposed data vector partition associated with an innovative data processing technique for the MOE detector. Simulation results show that the expected advantage of the proposed scheme can be achieved at the expense of a reasonable performance loss even in the presence of a large CFO.