Symbol timing offset tracking for DRM receiver

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system performance degrades due to symbol misalignment. We propose a symbol synchronization scheme based on channel estimation (CE). We applied linear interpolation in time domain and Winner filter in frequency domain to implement CE. The first path time delay of channel determines symbol timing offset. We perform inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) to obtain channel impulse response (CIR) after linear interpolation in CE. Zero-padding and windowing are used to increase accuracy before IFFT. We propose a criteria to judge the first path time delay and search for the first path of channel according to CIR profile. The criteria is statistically based on a large amount of simulation results. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed solution is effective to eliminate the effect of multipath fading channel in digital radio mondiale (DRM) system.