Pilot-Assisted Fine Frequency Synchronization for OFDM-Based DVB Receivers

After coarse synchronization in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, there might still be a residual frequency offset (RFO) and a sampling clock frequency offset (SFO), which seriously degrade the performance of the systems. This paper proposes a simple way of jointly estimating the RFO and SFO by using a continual pilot (CP) defined in an OFDM-based digital video broadcasting (DVB) system. For deriving an unbiased joint RFO and SFO estimator in the current DVB system, a CP subset is selected to simultaneously remove the effect of RFO and SFO. We can observe by simulation that the proposed frequency estimator endowed with a properly selected CP subset is unbiased and performs robustly.