Novel frame synchronization for WiMAX OFDM systems

Frame synchronization is a critical factor for effective operation of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) schemes. This paper studies the frame synchronization of OFDM based wireless systems and proposes a new method for IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) to improve its performance. The preamble, which is used in this method, is consists of two identical halves, and our method uses the correlation between these two parts in a new efficient form. Our metric calculates the start point within two levels. It finds some possible points as start point in the first level and removes the irrelevant candidates at the second level. The performance of proposed metric and existing ones is compared in terms of mean square error (MSE) and probability of correct detection in AWGN and multipath fading channels. Simulation results show that the proposed method has better performances than famous methods, which were proposed by Schmidl, Minn, Park, Kim, Meng, and in both AWGN and multipath fading Rayleigh channels. Also, compared to new methods with more accurate performance, proposed method has egual performance with less complexity.