Effect of Timing Synchronization Error on the Bit Error Rate Performance of an OFDM System

Performance of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission system is evaluated analytically taking into considerations the combined influence of receiver noise, Rayleigh fading and the timing error due to imperfect slot synchronization at the receiver. Performance results are presented in terms of bit error rate (BER) at a bit rate of 100 kbps in the presence of inter-channel interference (ICI) and intersymbol interference (ISI) and additive white Gaussian channel noise. The power penalty suffered by the system due to above system imperfections is also determined at a BER of 10^-6. The results show that there is a significant degradation in system BER due to timing error. The computed results show that the penalty suffered by the system only due to timing synchronization error is about 2.0 dB corresponding to timing bit errors to the right of m = 10 and is 5.25 dB for m = 14.