Exploiting hidden pilots for carrier frequency offset estimation for generalized MC-CDMA systems

This paper proposes a novel carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation method for generalized MC-CDMA systems in unknown frequency-selective channels utilizing hidden pilots. It is established that CFO is identifiable in the frequency-domain by employing cyclic statistics (CS) and linear regression (LR) algorithms. We show that the CS-based estimator is capable of mitigating the normalized CFO (NCFO) to a small error value. Then, the LR-based estimator can be employed to offer more accurate estimation by removing the residual quantization error after the CS-based estimator