A Low-Complexity Carrier Frequency Offset Estimator for OFDM System with Virtual Subcarriers

A maximum likelihood (ML) estimator of carrier frequency offset (CFO) based on virtual carriers is firstly proposed in [1]. Its main disadvantage is large computational amount. By IFFT and piecewise searching techniques, its complexity is significantly reduced. Simulation results in AWGN and Typical Urban (TU) channels show that the simplified ML estimator has low complexity and achieves the same performance as the original one.