New Integer Normalized Carrier Frequency Offset Estimators

Carrier frequency offset (CFO) introduces spectrum misalignment of the transmit and receive filters, causing energy loss and distortion of received signal. A recent study presents an accurate signal model that incorporates these characteristics. However, CFO estimators in the existing literature were developed based on the signal models without these characteristics. This paper generalizes the accurate signal model with CFO to include timing offset and sampling offset and then studies what effects the accurate signal model bring to the CFO estimation and how to address them. We investigate different existing CFO estimators and find some of them lose their optimality under the accurate signal model. We also develop two new integer normalized CFO (ICFO) estimators under the accurate signal model using only one OFDM symbol; one of them is a pilot-aided estimator using both pilot and data and the other one is a blind estimator using data only. Compared with the existing approaches, both of the new estimators make better use of channel and energy loss information, thus yielding more accurate estimation. Furthermore, the proposed methods overcome the existing approaches' limitation to phase shift keying modulation. Simulation results corroborate the advantages of the new estimators. Analytical performance results are also provided for the proposed estimators.