Joint carrier frequency offset and channel estimation for OFDM systems with two receive antennas

Carrier frequency offset (CFO) in OFDM systems results in loss of channel orthogonality and hence degrades the system’s performance. In this paper, we propose a new method for joint CFO/channel estimation for OFDM systems with two receive antennas. Our method avoids the complexity of full search methods in one or two dimensions. Using one training OFDM symbol and utilizing the knowledge of the structure of the inter-channel interference that results from CFO, we develop a two-stage estimation procedure. The first stage derives an initial CFO/channel estimate based on a one shot minimization step. The second stage refines this joint estimate by conducting a small CFO search in the vicinity of the initial estimate. This procedure provides CFO estimates over a full range of N/2–N/2, (N: number of subcarriers), as well as the channel estimates. Computer simulations show an excellent performance that is very close to the Cramer–Rao lower bound and superior to some existing methods. The effect of antenna correlation on performance is also investigated through computer simulations, showing small performance degradation even at medium correlation coefficients (0.3–0.6). Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.