An Improved Derivative Method for Symbol Synchronization in OFDM Systems

This paper presents an improved derivative method to provide good symbol synchronization in multi-path channels for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. As the conventional derivative method (Willians et al., 2005), the improved derivative method can reduce the inter-symbol interference (ISI) caused by multi-path channels. Moreover, the proposed method is robust against the frequency offset and the filter length which are very selective to the conventional derivative method. Simulation results confirm that the improved derivative algorithm outperforms the maximum likelihood algorithm (ML) (Van De Veek et al., 1997) and the conventional derivative method.