Joint Frame/Frequency Synchronization and Channel Estimation for Single-Carrier FDE 60 GHz WPAN System

It is well-known that the OFDM scheme has some tolerance for symbol/frame timing errors (i.e. valid starting position of FFT window). Such tolerance exist for SC-FDE. However, frame timing offset affects the receiver performance due to deviation in frequency domain channel estimation result when fractional channel estimation vector is applied in time domain. To achieve optimized receive performance at all times, symbol/frame timing must be estimated precisely in accordance to the exact starting position of the channel estimation sequence block. In this paper, we propose an efficient frame/frequency synchronization along with channel estimation technique suitable for implementation of SC-FDE based 60 GHz WPAN physical layer systems employing a Frank-Zadoff preamble structure. The proposed method is designed for parallel processing, and is robust against carrier frequency offset in moderately dispersive multipath-fading LOS+NLOS channels.