Cyclostationarity-based symbol timing and carrier frequency offset estimation for OFDM system

Based on cyclostationary characteristics, a blind algorithm for estimating carrier frequency and symbol offset of multi-carrier Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system in Rayleigh multipath channels is proposed in this paper. Through selecting appropriate cycle frequencies, we first isolate the timing offset from frequency offset, and then propose independently time and frequency offset estimation method respectively. Computer simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can resist Rayleigh multipath channel; the performance of the estimator is robust to Signal-to-Noise (SNR) in wide-sense stationary noise. Furthermore, the symbol timing estimation errors do not affect the frequency offset results, and similarly, the frequency offset estimation result doesn´t affect the symbol timing estimation results.