Blind estimation of timing and carrier frequency offsets in OFDM systems

A novel approach is proposed for blind synchronization of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The power spectrum and spectral correlation, computed using frequency domain signals, are exploited to independently recover the timing and carrier frequency offsets in closed form. The proposed estimators performance is evaluated for the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and the Rayleigh fading channels. They show enhanced performance in terms of Mean Square Error (MSE) when compared to estimators using the temporal autocorrelation. Moreover, the proposed estimators do not require any channel knowledge.