A reduced complexity scheme for carrier frequency synchronization in uplink 802.16e OFDMA

Synchronization of the carrier frequency offset (CFO) in the uplink of OFDMA systems is a complex task because each user presents a different CFO. It is performed in two stages: estimation and compensation. Although a few existing schemes already achieve good performance in terms of bit error rate (BER), all of them perform huge amounts of operations, specially during estimation, thus leading to very costly, if not impractical, hardware implementations. In addition, if estimation is performed in the time domain, a preamble is required. Since the IEEE 802.16e standard for OFDMA has no preamble at the beginning of the uplink frame, optional midambles must be used at the cost of reducing the system throughput. This article proposes a combined CFO estimation and compensation technique that uses the pilot subcarriers of the 802.16e frame. It achieves similar BER performance than previous approaches without any throughput penalty, while reducing the number of required computations by several orders of magnitude. This reduction is the result of a simpler estimation algorithm and two techniques that improve its accuracy: an iterative process integrated with the compensation stage and the delayed correction of the phase shifts.