A simple scheme to rectify erroneous symbol timing in OFDM systems

A novel OFDM symbol timing recovery mechanism for the reduction of inter-symbol interference is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme utilizes a minimum distance estimator to calculate the distance between the cyclic prefix (CP) and the received OFDM symbol. A timing recovery mechanism is adopted to rectify symbol timing synchronization such that inter-symbol interference can be essentially eliminated. Simulation result demonstrates that the proposed scheme substantially improves the system performance for both AWGN and frequency selective fading channels.