High-Performance Blind Carrier Frequency Offset Estimator for OFDM Systems

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) finds various applications in wireless communications. In a practical OFDM system, Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) destroys the orthogonality among the subcarriers, and hence introduces Intercarrier Interference (ICI). This contribution proposes a novel Blind Carrier Frequency Offset Estimator (BCFOE). The BCFOE is based on kurtosis, and can identify CFO within the range of half subcarrier spacing of OFDM systems. Compared with the existing low-complexity blind CFO estimation technique [9, 10, 11], the BCFOE, for the same computational complexity, has the better performance. Simulation results confirm the superior performance of the proposed BCFOE.