Frequency synchronization in OFDM

We present an OFDM frequency synchronization scheme. The scheme uses periodic OFDM symbols, similar to the algorithms proposed previously by Morelli and Mengali (1999) and Schmidl and Cox (1997). The proposed scheme attains considerably higher accuracy than the scheme by Schmidl and Cox requiring a similar computational load. Compared to the scheme by Morelli and Mengali, the proposed algorithm attains a somewhat inferior accuracy but at a significantly reduced computational complexity, i.e O(N) versus O(N²) operations for N-tone OFDM. In addition to that, the scheme proposed here is considerably less sensitive to the accuracy of the involved computations than the other two schemes.