Hardware Implementation of a Correlation-based Synchronization Algorithm for Wireless OFDM

In the world of wireless communications, OFDM is one of the most used multicarrier techniques today. The main reasons for that are the multipath immunity that provides and the easy implementation of FFT, but OFDM systems are sensitive to timing synchronization errors. This paper shows a novel synchronization algorithm for the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard. The proposed method performs frame detection and determines the beginning of the data frame, by using a combination of auto and cross correlation techniques. Besides, a FPGA implementation of the developed algorithm is achieved in order to evaluate its performance on a real system.