Fast frequency synchronization method for OFDM systems

We propose a coarse estimation scheme of carrier frequency offset in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The proposed method uses the correlation which is put between the subcarriers of the training symbols to estimate the integer part of the relative frequency offset. The algorithm can estimate a relatively wide range of carrier frequency offset in spite of its much lower computational complexity compared to the conventional cross-correlation methods. Simulation results show that the missing rate of the coarse estimator is sufficiently low and the variance of the final estimates approaches the Cramer-Rao lower bound at reasonable range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).