Decimal frequency offset estimation in COFDM wireless communications

Timing jitter, frequency offset, carrier phase jitter and sampling clock frequency offset are the main synchronization errors encountered by OFDM systems. As many literature studies have proved, OFDM systems are very sensitive to frequency errors. In this paper, an improved method for decimal frequency offset estimation in time domain is proposed. In addition, lots of simulations have proved that when the decimal frequency offset in data streams approaches 0.5 of the subcarrier spacing, a wrong estimated frequency offset with inverse polarity will be presented, and therefore, a novel adjusting model to deal with this problem is also proposed in this paper. Simulation results show that the mean square error (MSE) can be significantly improved by over three orders of magnitude at high SNR with the proposed method compared with the conventional method. The corresponding field programmable gate array (FPGA) circuit through test in HDTV prototype in Team of Engineering Expert Group (TEEG) proves its feasibility and availability.