A novel preamble-based robust coarse symbol timing estimators for OFDM systems

In this paper, we propose a preamble-based symbol timing estimator for wireless orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The preamble is designed with repeated structure. By using several candidate sequences generated by the preamble, the addressed estimator is robust to the degree of channel distortions. The generated sequences with the best correlation properties are selected based on correlation ranking. Compared with the existing representative schemes, our estimator has performance improvement in ETU channel with acceptable complexity.