A Maximum Likelihood Fine Timing Estimation for Wireless OFDM Systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems are more sensitive to timing synchronization than single carrier systems. This paper presents a fine timing synchronization scheme which utilizes the channel impulse response (CIR) estimated from frequency-domain samples at OFDM receivers. A maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) of timing offset is derived based on the probability distribution of the estimated CIR under time-varying multipath fading. The ML timing scheme is further developed for both integer precision and real-valued precision implementations. In the real-valued timing precision case, a delay locked loop (DLL) structure is devised as an effective way to implement the MLE. Both analysis and simulations of the proposed MLE showed significant improvement over existing schemes under time-varying multipath fading channels.