A high-efficiency carrier estimator for OFDM communications

While multipath induced phase rotations can be dealt with by differential encoding in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communications, the loss of orthogonality due to the carrier offset must be compensated before discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-based demodulation can be performed. In this letter, we present a high-performance/low-complexity blind carrier offset estimation algorithm by exploiting intrinsic structure information of OFDM signals. The algorithm offers the accuracy of a super resolution subspace method, viz. MUSIC, without involving computationally intensive subspace decompositions.