Symbol synchronization for OFDM based heterogeneous network in the presence of co-channel interference

This paper explores the symbol synchronization in the presence of co-channel interference (CCI) of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based heterogeneous network (HetNet). The CCI is generated by a HetNet model with macrocell and small cells. Schmidl and Cox (S&C) Algorithm is applied for symbol synchronization. We find that the presence of CCI severely degrades the performance of the S&C Algorithm. To mitigate the CCI effect, a pre-filter technique based on least mean square (LMS) adaptive noise cancellation (ANC) is proposed to remove the CCI and improve the performance of the S&C Algorithm. As the simulation results show, the performance of the S&C Algorithm in the presence of severe CCI has been greatly improved especially for SIR ranges from 0 dB to 10 dB.