An efficient CFO estimation algorithm for the downlink of 3GPP-LTE

Synchronization is of fundamental importance for wireless cellular systems, especially for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based systems. In this paper, we investigate carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation in the initial synchronization for the downlink of 3GPP-long term evolution (3GPP-LTE). Firstly, three traditional CFO estimation schemes including the primary synchronization channel (P-SCH) signals (PSS) correlation based scheme, the cyclic prefix (CP) based scheme, and the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) based scheme, are respectively applied. Simulation results show that the PSS correlation based scheme can achieve better performance than the other two. Furthermore, we extend the traditional PSS correlation based scheme, and propose a more efficient CFO estimation algorithm. Simulation results show that, compared to the traditional estimator, the proposed estimator has better estimation performance in terms of normalized mean square error (MSE), and achieves a gain of around 2 dB over both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels and frequency selective fading channels.