Symbol Time Synchronization Based on SINR Maximization for OFDM

This work presents a symbol time (ST) synchronization algorithm for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing systems based on a metric of signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) which drops drastically with the increasing ST error. The ST is intuitively estimated by maximizing the SINR metric that exploits the correlation results of the separated-by-N samples. Unlike most existing techniques considering only AWGN or time-invariant multipath channels, the proposed maximum-SINR (MSINR) technique considers the time-variant multipath channels. Compared with conventional techniques, the proposed MSINR technique is less sensitive to the carrier frequency offset and doubly-selective channel effects.