Joint time-frequency domain cyclostationarity-based approach to blind estimation of OFDM transmission parameters

Blind estimation of the transmission parameters of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal is an important issue for various civilian and military applications. This paper presents a new cyclostationarity-based approach to blind estimation of OFDM signal parameters. Analytical expression for extracting transmission parameters from second-order cyclic cumulant (CC) of OFDM signal is derived first, with the consideration of the effects of time dispersion and consistent estimator errors on CC. The approach exploits the cyclostationarity of OFDM both in time delay domain and cyclic frequency domain; a statistic hypothesis testing framework was formulated to determine the threshold for detecting the presence of cycles of OFDM signal. The simulation results reveal that the proposed approach is robust for both previous synchronization and channel condition concurrently.