Oversampling to reduce the effect of timing jitter on high speed OFDM systems

The impairments caused by timing jitter are a significant limiting factor in the performance of very high data rate OFDM systems. In this letter we show that oversampling can reduce the noise caused by timing jitter. Both fractional oversampling achieved by leaving some band-edge OFDM subcarriers unused and integral oversampling are considered. The theoretical results are compared with simulation results for the case of white timing jitter showing very close agreement. Oversampling results in a 3 dB reduction in jitter noise power for every doubling of the sampling rate.