An enhanced fine timing synchronization method for diagonal pilot OFDM system

In this paper, a new fine timing synchronization method of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system is presented to solve the performance degradation from the diagonally allocated pilot structure. For systems based on diagonal pilots, by using the conventional timing estimation method which is proposed by Hsieh and Wei, the estimation performance can be degraded due to the relatively large pilot distance in the frequency selective fading channel. Therefore, we propose a new fine timing synchronization method, which is based on symbol accumulation with phase interpolation, and that can reduce the effect of frequency selectivity and frequency offset. By mathematical analysis and simulation, we verified that the proposed method can achieve better performance than conventional method in large frequency selective fading environment.