Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing synchronization techniques

Abstract

Synchronization plays a major role in the design of a digital communication system. Essentially, this function aims at retrieving some reference parameters from the received signal that are necessary for reliable data detection. The OFDM is very sensitive to symbol timing and frequency offset. The loss of orthogonality among the subcarriers causes degradation of the OFDM system performance. so, the timing and frequency offset must be estimated and compensated before demodulating the OFDM signals. This report presents the study of different synchronization schemes for OFDM receiver. Different methods like Schmidl-Cox synchronizer, The Coulson synchronizer, The Minn-Zeng Bhargava synchronizer, Blind carrier offset estimation using unused subcarriers etc. Matlab experiments are conducted to study the performance of different synchronization schemes. The simulations results shows that Blind estimation method is more advantage over training symbol and Cyclic Prefix (CP) based methods in terms of Bandwidth saving.