Pilot-Aided Iterative Frequency Offset Estimation for Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) Systems

The main disadvantage of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is its sensitivity to carrier frequency offset and timing offset. This paper proposes a simple way of improving the performance of the integer frequency offset (IFO) estimator in OFDM-based digital video broadcasting (DVB) system. By modifying the conventional maximum likelihood (ML) estimator to have multi-stage estimation strategy, two IFO estimators are derived. Simulations indicate that the proposed IFO estimators work robustly with reduced computational burden when compared to ML estimator.