Blind Sampling Clock Offset Estimation in OFDM Systems Based on Second Order Statistics

Synchronization mismatches are of an outstanding harm to the performance of an OFDM receiver. More specifically, sampling clock offset (SCO), if not compensated, could lead to an unacceptable BER increase. In this paper we exploit the second order statistics of the received OFDM samples to provide a blind estimation of the SCO. The proposed method gives satisfactory results without the need of a synchronization symbol, thus achieving high spectral efficiency.