Narrowband Interference Effect on Timing Synchronization for OFDM-based Spectrum Sharing System

The promising spectrum sharing technology used to improve the spectrum usage may cause severe narrowband interference, which seriously degrades the timing synchronization. As noticed that only the auto-correlation based methods have been investigated in the literature, this paper examines the impairment of narrowband interference to the cross-correlation based timing synchronization, to obtain a comprehensive evaluation of typical timing synchronization algorithms in the presence of narrowband interference. The detection performance is studied in terms of miss detection and false alarm probabilities. The theoretical performance is derived based on the statistical property of the additive noise and the narrowband interference, followed by numerical simulation which verifies the theoretical analysis.