A new simple timing synchronization method by subtraction process for OFDM packet transmission systems

We propose a new simple timing synchronization method for the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) packet transmission systems in this paper. The conventional synchronization method adopts to calculate signal correlation by multiplication employing the feature of preamble or cyclic prefix in burst packet. However, multiplication circuit makes volume of digital signal processing (DSP) larger and more complex. In order to design a low-complex receiver, we replace the complex process by multiplication with the simple one by subtraction in the proposed method. We evaluated the performance of the proposed method from view points of timing offset mean, variance and bit error rate (BER) performance by computer simulation. Adopting simpler process, the proposed method shows that it can acquire quite smaller variance of timing offset and has equivalent BER performance to the conventional method under both slow and fast multipath fading environments.