An improved timing estimation method for OFDM systems

In this paper, we propose an improved timing estimation method for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The proposed preamble-aided method is independent of the preamble structure and is based on taking advantage of the whole products available from a given preamble for its correlation. Capable of having an extended correlation length far beyond those used by the previous methods, the proposed scheme presents an estimator with a remarkable performance in severe noise conditions. Further, we introduce a reduced complexity estimator along with the complexity assessments. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed method in terms of mean square error (MSE). The results indicate that the new method significantly improves the performance compared to the previously presented methods.