Coarse frame synchronization for OFDM systems using SNR estimation

In wireless orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, coarse frame synchronization and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values are two crucial parameters for OFDM receivers. In this paper, we develop a coarse timing estimator to overcome the plateau phenomenon by using delayed correlation between two estimated SNR values. The training symbol is designed for multiple pieces instead of two parts to mitigate the Doppler effect for SNR estimation. Compared with the Minn´s scheme, our proposed scheme has smaller estimation variance both in EVA and ETU channels, which can also provide an estimated SNR value in the time domain. The obtained SNR value can be further reused to carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation or decoding for system performance improvement.