Frequency-immune and low-complexity symbol timing synchronization scheme in OFDM systems

In this paper, we propose a simple time-domain replica correlation (TDRC) based symbol timing synchronization scheme in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems. By allocating a locally concatenated sequence of a base sequence and its modified sequence to total feasible frequency resources, we can achieve both hardware complexity and frequency offset reductions. The hardware complexity of a searcher is less than halved over existing TDRC-based schemes, such as long-term evolution (LTE) scheme and a performance-efficient scheme. Also the proposed scheme provides significant frequency offset immunity over the LTE scheme. The performance analysis and comparisons are made in terms of complexity and detection error probability.