Timing synchronisation for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing using improved cross-correlation

A timing synchronisation method for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) using improved cross-correlation (ICC) is proposed in this study. The proposed method is derived in terms of maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) criterion over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. In this way, the proposed ICC method is able to take into consideration the surrounded data signals, which is not considered in the conventional cross-correlation (CCC) method and thus the timing accuracy is improved accordingly. Compared to the CCC method, the ICC method only appends a correction term to the cross-correlator output, which can be easily implemented using an iterative method. Therefore the complexity of the proposed ICC method has no significant increase. Simulation results show that the proposed ICC method significantly outperforms the CCC based timing method.