A novel sampling synchronization scheme for OFDM-based system with unified reference clock

Due to the constraint of cost and size for mobile wireless communication terminals, many orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based systems required the same crystal driving the sampling and the channel frequencies, which leads to the challenge of a more comprehensive sampling clock synchronization scheme needed. In this article, the effect of sampling clock error on the system performance was analyzed by dividing it into sampling clock frequency offset (SFO) and sampling timing error (STE) firstly. After that, we proposed a two-stage scheme of sampling clock synchronization based on theoretical derivation: the preliminary SFO was jointly acquired with the carrier frequency offset by using the improved preamble-aided algorithm firstly, the timing drift resulted from residual SFO and STE was tracked based on a phase looped lock in the second stage. The deviation properties of the estimation were achieved theoretically, which reveals that both the estimating variances of SFO and timing drift are in inverse proportion to signal-to-noise ratio and grow linearly by the number of total subcarrier. The results of the simulation show that the proposed synchronization scheme can introduce preferable tracking and robust synchronizing performance for this kind of OFDM-based system.