Initial Synchronization for Multi-Cell OFDMA Systems

In this paper, a complete solution to the initial synchronization for multi-cell OFDMA (orthogonal frequency division multiple access) systems is proposed. The proposed method consists of the following operations: timing synchronization, fractional carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation, fractional CFO compensation, and joint integer CFO and preamble index estimation. To estimate multiple fractional CFOs with pseudo-periodic preamble, we suggest an over-sampling approach. An ill-condition detection and noise suppression algorithm is also presented. For joint integer CFO and preamble index estimation, we use a differential detection based cross-correlation method. Simulation results have shown that the proposed method gives satisfactory performance for a wide SNR range even when the mobile station (MS) is on the cell boundaries.