A novel non-data-aided symbol timing recovery technique for OFDM systems

A new highly efficient non-data-aided technique to recover symbol timing of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing systems is proposed. The algorithm in the proposed work exploits the interference that results due to the loss of orthogonality between subcarriers, where the second-order statistics of the resulting interference is proportional to the offset from the optimum sampling point. The presented technique does not require prior fine carrier synchronization, and it is capable of extracting symbol timing at low E_s/N₀ values with large carrier frequency offsets (CFOs). The system performance was investigated in multipath fading channels with large CFOs and additive white Gaussian noise.