A New Symbol Timing Synchronization Design for OFDM WLAN Systems

In this paper, we present a new symbol timing synchronization method for OFDM WLANs. A new method to do symbol timing synchronization in time domain based on preamble structure of the IEEE 802.11a is proposed. The consecutive preamble structure is exploited to find the symbol starting-point accurately even under low SNR. The proposed synchronizer performs the fine timing synchronization first, and recognizes the end of short training symbol by coarse timing synchronization. Simulations show that it has distinct advantage over the conventional methods under multi-path wireless channel condition even though it uses the fixed threshold for decision.