Timing recovery for OFDM transmission

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is an effective modulation technique for high-rate and high-speed transmission over frequency selective fading channels. However, OFDM systems can be extremely sensitive and vulnerable to synchronization errors. In this paper, we present a scheme for performing timing recovery that includes symbol synchronization and sampling clock synchronization in OFDM systems. The scheme is based on pilot subcarriers. In the scheme, we use a path time delay estimation method to improve the accuracy of the correlation-based symbol synchronization methods, and use a delay-locked loop (DLL) to do the sampling clock synchronization. It is shown that by using this scheme, the mean square values of the symbol timing estimation error can be decreased by several orders of magnitude compared to the common correlation methods in both the AWGN and multipath fading channels. In addition, the scheme can track the symbol timing drift caused by the sampling clock frequency offsets.