Blind estimation of carrier frequency offset for OFDM systems with time-varying DC offset

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been widely adopted in radar and communication systems. High sensitivity to carrier frequency offset (CFO) is one of the major drawbacks of OFDM. CFO estimation for OFDM systems had been extensively studied and various algorithms had been proposed. However, the established algorithms may be compromised by the adoption of direct-conversion architecture and multi-mode low noise amplifier in the OFDM receiver, which introduces time-varying direct current offset (TV-DCO) into the system. In our previous study, we developed an eigen-decomposition based estimation algorithm, which is robust to TV-DCO but suffers from performance degradation under low to medium signal-to-noise ratio and requires high computation efforts. To address those issues, we in this paper propose a novel blind CFO estimation algorithm. By making use of the second order differential filtering and subspace method, the proposed algorithm achieves great performance improvement with reduced complexity. The performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by simulations.