Time-Domain Joint Estimation of Fine Symbol Timing Offset and Integer Carrier Frequency Offset

In this paper, we propose an efficient synchronization method to jointly estimate fine symbol timing offset (STO) and integer carrier frequency offset (CFO). The proposed method is to perform cross-correlation between received samples and pre-rotated training sequences. Experimental results on IEEE 802.16d systems show that the proposed method is significantly superior to the previous approaches in both estimations. Since the fine STO and the integer CFO are jointly estimated in the time domain in an on-the-fly manner, the proposed method requires no additional buffers. Moreover, the proposed joint estimation has an effect of eliminating the processing ordering dependency of the two estimations, being attractive for systems requiring tight synchronization.