Hardware-efficient auto-correlation for synchronization of MIMO-OFDM WLAN systems

This paper presents a hardware-efficient autocorrelation scheme for the synchronization of MIMO-OFDM based wireless local area network (WLAN) systems, such as IEEE 802.11n. Carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation for the frequency synchronization requires high complexity autocorrelation operations of many training symbols. In order to reduce the hardware complexity of the MIMO-OFDM synchronization, we propose an efficient correlation scheme based on time-multiplexing technique and the use of reduced samples while preserving the performance. Compared to a conventional architecture, the proposed architecture requires only 27% logic gates and 22% power consumption with acceptable BER performance loss.