Golay complementary pair aided time synchronization method for OFDM systems

A new preamble is designed and a novel symbol timing synchronization scheme for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is proposed. The preamble is composed of a golay complementary pair and two zero-value sequences. By utilizing the nonperiodic auto-correlation complementary property of the golay pair, the proposed timing metric has the impulsive peak at the correct timing point. The introduced algorithm implemented by the computer simulation shows that the proposed algorithm has better performance than the conventional methods both in mean error and mean square error (MSE) of timing offset estimation, and more robust to the multipath Rayleigh fading channels.