Time and Frequency Synchronisation in 4G OFDM Systems

This paper presents a complete synchronisation scheme of a baseband OFDM receiver for the currently designed 4G mobile communication system. Since the OFDM transmission is vulnerable to time and frequency offsets, accurate estimation of these parameters is one of the most important tasks of the OFDM receiver. In this paper, the design of a single OFDM synchronisation pilot symbol is introduced. The pilot is used for coarse timing offset and fractional frequency offset estimation. However, it can be applied for fine timing synchronisation and integer frequency offset estimation algorithms as well. A new timing metric that improves the performance of the coarse timing synchronisation is presented. Time domain synchronisation is completed after receiving this single OFDM pilot symbol. During the tracking phase, carrier frequency and sampling frequency offsets are tracked and corrected by means of the nondata-aided algorithm developed by the author. The proposed concept was tested by means of computer simulations, where the OFDM signal was transmitted over a multipath Rayleigh fading channel characterised by the WINNER channel models with Doppler shift and additive white Gaussian noise.