A Novel Time and Frequency Synchronization Approach for OFDM Systems

In this paper a novel time and frequency synchronization method for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system is proposed. Preamble symbols are not used for synchronization like traditional solutions, thus the overhead of preambles can be eliminated and the spectrum efficiency of the system can be increased greatly, especially for short data bursts. It uses the cyclic prefix for coarse time synchronization and fractional frequency offset estimation. The integer frequency offset is obtained exploiting the pilot information. And the decoded information is used for fine time synchronization and fractional frequency offset estimation to get better synchronization performance