Blind estimation of symbol timing and carrier frequency offset in pulse shaping OFDM systems

We introduce a blind algorithm for the joint estimation of symbol timing and carrier frequency offset in pulse shaping OFDM systems. The proposed estimator exploits the cyclostationarity of the received OFDM signal and can be seen as an extension of the Gini-Giannakis estimator (see IEEE Trans. Comm., vol.46, p.400-11, 1998) for single-carrier systems. An important feature of our method is the capability to perform a carrier frequency acquisition over the entire bandwidth of the OFDM signal. Furthermore, our estimator can be applied even if no cyclic prefix is used. We provide simulation results demonstrating the performance of the new estimator