Inter-Frame, Fine Frequency/Phase Synchronization forSimple Space-Time-Coded OFDM Receivers

This paper proposes an enhanced receiver (Rx) configuration for multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) OFDM systems, operating under the composite effect of phase noise (PHN), residual frequency offset (RFO) and the transmission channel, herein modeled as quasi-static but unknown. The proposed Rx identifies the different impairments by exploiting their different time constants and compensates for each one accordingly. It includes a novel inter-frame fine frequency synchronization (FFS) scheme, which is closely coupled to an intra-frame adaptive phase synchronizer/channel estimator. The proposed scheme is evaluated for a 2 times 2, Alamouti space-time code (STC), and is shown to provide significant performance gain. The theory can be employed with any other STC scheme.