OFDM carrier offset estimation based on signal phase matching principle

One of the major problem in applying OFDM to underwater channels is that it is vulnerable to carrier frequency offset (CFO) caused by transceiver mismatch and/or Doppler shifts. And the loss of orthogonality due to the CFO effects must be compensated before the demodulation with discrete Fourier transform. This paper proposes a novel CFO estimation technique for OFDM communications over an underwater acoustic channel. We exploit the intrinsic structure information of OFDM signals to derive a CFO estimator based on signal-phase-matching (SPM) principle. Simulation results show that the main advantages of the proposed technique are its computation simplicity and high accuracy.