A method for minimum-interference OFDM time synchronization

We present a new method for OFDM time synchronization in dispersive channels. Like previous methods, this technique utilizes the signal correlation generated from the cyclic prefix. However, some methods do not fully incorporate the effects of the channel and implicitly assume the channel is either non-dispersive or is shorter than the cyclic-prefix length. Moreover, some techniques based upon maximum likelihood (ML) estimation are not entirely consistent with a more important goal of minimizing the interference or BER of the system. Our new method, based upon computed statistics of the received samples, tackles both of these issues, and preliminary results outperform the ML method.