Subspace based blind CFO estimation for OFDM by exploiting used carriers

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising technique to handle impairments of multipath channel. Alternatively, one of its major drawbacks is the drift in reference carrier, which is known as carrier frequency offset (CFO). Hence, the CFO should be estimated and compensated with a sufficient accuracy. In this paper, a new algorithm for blind CFO-OFDM estimation is obtained by introducing the propagator method (PM) in conjunction with the well-known MUSIC based high resolution searching algorithm. Furthermore, the PM does not require the eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) or singular value decomposition (SVD) of the covariance matrix of the received signals; Simulations are also included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with other conventional methods.