Highly Accurate Blind Carrier Frequency Offset Estimator for Mobile OFDM Systems

For orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication systems, the orthogonality among subcarriers is lost in mobile applications due to frequency offset resulting from either transmitter-receiver local oscillator differences or Doppler shift caused by mobility. As a direct result, inter-carrier interference (ICI) is observed on each and every subcarrier, leading to significant performance degradation. There are a lot of OFDM carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation schemes classified as data aided estimation and blind estimation. Due to the system power and high bandwidth efficiencies, blind estimators have received a lot of attention recently. Many blind CFO schemes were proposed for OFDM systems, some of which are based on power spectrum smoothing, kurtosis-type cost functions and minimum output variance. In this paper, we propose a novel blind CFO estimator based on Minimum Reconstruction Error (MRE). In contrast to other blind CFO estimators, the proposed technique can be used for any constellation schemes, does not require a large number of blocks to reach acceptable estimation error and provides reliable estimation performance with very low mean square error (MSE). Simulation results in AWGN and multi-path fading channels confirm that performance of the proposed highly accurate blind CFO estimator is superior when frequency offset or time variation occurs in the channel - the proposed technique outperforms most existing blind CFO estimation methods.