Carrier frequency synchronization in the downlink of 3GPP LTE

In this paper, we investigate carrier frequency synchronization in the downlink of 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE). A complete carrier frequency offset estimation and compensation scheme based on standardized synchronization signals and reference symbols is presented. The estimation performance in terms of mean square error is derived analytically and compared to simulation results. The impact of estimation error on the system performance is shown in terms of uncoded bit error ratio and physical layer coded throughput. Compared to perfect synchronization, the presented maximum likelihood estimator shows hardly any performance loss, even when the most sophisticated MIMO schemes of LTE are employed.