Blind carrier frequency offset estimation for OFDM systems based on kurtosis

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems find various applications in wireless communications. In a practical OFDM system, carrier frequency offset (CFO) destroys the orthogonality among the subcarriers, and degrades the system performance. In this paper, a blind carrier frequency offset estimator (BCFOE) is proposed to identify CFO in OFDM systems. The proposed BCFOE is based on kurtosis, and can estimate CFO within the range of half subcarrier spacing. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed BCFOE outperforms existing techniques as presented in W. Chung and C. R. Johnson (2002) and Y. Yao and G. B. Giannakis (2005) without increasing the computational complexity. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed BCFOE.