A new timing estimation and compensation scheme for ultra-wideband MB-OFDM communications

A low-complexity correlation based symbol timing synchronization (CBTS) algorithm for UWB MB-OFDM systems is presented here. The scheme attempts to locate the start of the Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) window during frame synchronization (FS) sequence of the received preamble by firstly correlating the received samples with known training samples and then identifying the first significant multi-path component by comparing the correlated samples of two consecutive OFDM symbols against a predefined threshold. The algorithm is tested by computer simulation over all UWB channel models (CM), CM1—CM4; each for 100,000 noisy channel realizations under 17dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Performance of the proposed algorithm is measured through mean-squared error (MSE) of timing estimation and probability of synchronization.