A time-frequency decision-feedback loop for carrier frequency offset tracking in OFDM systems

Acquisition and tracking are two crucial stages necessary to the carrier frequency synchronization in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In this letter, by employing the rotation property of OFDM data subcarriers, a simple time-frequency decision-feedback loop without the use of pilot subcarriers is proposed for the fine carrier frequency offset (CFO) tracking. Specifically, with proper loop parameters, a residual CFO less than 10% of the subcarrier spacing may be well tracked for quarternary phase-shift keying (QPSK) modulation in the presence of noise, while for systems using QPSK, 16-QAM, and 64-QAM modulation schemes, the bit-error rate (BER) performance very close to that of an offset-free system may be achieved in both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and frequency selective fading channels. Moreover, a hardware implementation in a practical OFDM system is fulfilled which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.