Interference analysis of OFDM signals for blind timing synchronization

For OFDM systems, link performance heavily depends on frequency-offset estimation. Since symbol timing must be done before other synchronization, perfect timing estimate is a prerequisite for the better frequency estimation. As to timing synchronization, minimum interference power (MIP) algorithm can be a good candidate for a non-data-aided timing recovery. In order to use MIP as a metric for timing synchronization, interference should be a function of timing errors and be easily separated from desired signals. In this paper, we propose a MIP algorithm for symbol timing where the extraction of interference components is implemented by oversampling the band-limited received signals and performing discrete Fourier transform (DFT) for the oversampled sequence.