Practical Packet Detection and Symbol Timing Synchronization Scheme for Packet OFDM System

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has become the most demanded broadband communication technology of today. The technology spans from copper line digital subscriber line (DSL) and cable modem to wireless digital audio/video broadcasting (DAB/DVB) and wireless local area network (WLAN) to power-line communication (PLC) applications. The increasing number of different applications related to OFDM has produced many different methods and techniques to harness the OFDM technology. This paper has the same intention by proposing a practical hardware approach to implement packet detection and coarse symbol timing synchronization methods for packet OFDM that applies to all wire-line, wireless and PLC applications in general. Combining both methods in interdependent fashion using multi-thread state-machine control mechanism produces a very robust system when it performs under additive Gaussian white noise (AWGN) channel in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels. Optimum design architectures to implement auto-correlation, cross-correlation and other signal processing functions are also discussed