Cramer-Rao Bound for Joint Carrier Frequency Offset, Symbol Timing Offset and Channel Taps in MC-CDMA Systems

In this paper, Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for joint carrier frequency and symbol timing offsets and channel taps is proposed for multi carrier code division multiple access (MC- CDMA) systems. CRB provides a benchmark by which, the performance of any unbiased estimator can be compared. Minimum variance unbiased (MVU) estimator is the one that attains the CRB for all values of the unknown parameter. We further compare the performances of the MVU and maximum likelihood (ML) estimators presented in [1] by numerical results with the proposed CRB.