On the value of spatial diversity for the synchronisation in MIMO-OFDM systems

This paper investigates the value of spatial diversity for the synchronisation in MIMO-OFDM systems. A preamble-based synchronisation scheme exploiting the available spatial diversity of a MIMO system is proposed and evaluated by simulation. It is shown that synchronisation becomes significantly more reliable compared to a system where only single antennas are used within the synchronisation process. The largest share of this improvement is achieved by exploiting receive diversity based on maximum ratio combining of the Schmidl-Cox correlation results at each receiving antenna; exploitation of transmit diversity leads to moderate further improvements