Matched filter based timing synchronization for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems

A robust matched filter based timing synchronization scheme for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is presented to achieve improved performance. Training symbol based timing synchronization often exhibits large estimation variance, resulting in performance degradation. The proposed method performs training symbol based timing synchronization at the receiver using matched filter, resulting in remarkable performance improvement in dispersive channels as compared to other methods. The same training symbol is used for channel estimation leading to channel equalization for further improvement in performance. Computer simulations are used to evaluate bit error rate performance for different channels, highlighting the improvement obtained through the proposed method.